Ms. Bishop wrote this poem several years after her lover of fifteen years committed suicide. Something in the title and the poem itself tells me that in creating her art, Bishop was expressing the enormity of her loss, facing it, and eventually enduring its gravity.
             Bishop uses the complex poetic form of the 16th century villanelle. The villanelle uses 3- lined stanzas and a final quatrain in which the first and third lines of the first stanza are repeated alternately in the succeeding stanzas as a refrain. Together they form a final couplet in the quatrain. She establishes the line 'The art of losing isn't hard to master' in her opening stanza, repeating it throughout the poem. There is a sense that she is clearly examining her emotions throughout, coming to a clear but precise conclusion literally commanding herself to 'write it!' Here, she cleverly deviates from the traditional form inserting the parentheses. That threw me off. I thought it bold and uniquely artistic.
             She seemed to use the repetition of the villanelle like a paintbrush to create 'art out of losing". It's almost like painting or drawing a picture over and again because it not 'saying' exactly what you want to say. I kept asking myself why did she use 'master' and 'disaster' so often? They were like a subliminal message telling me 'master' the 'disaster' don't let it master you. These words spoke to me throughout the trivial losses she described – loss of keys and in traveling. In the loss of her mother's watch and homes it seems to get a little more serious. In keeping the clarity and simplicity of repetition, I got a sense she was doing something more artistically. I thought of McFee's 'Medias Res' where he uses the lines to portray the oversized midriff of a man. That's when I saw that 'One Art" and h...