The Paradox of Loss: Insignificant or Monumental?

Souradrita Bhowmik

‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop is a very renowned poem about the value of human relationships, and how the loss of one results in significant emotional pain, as it is irreplaceable, unlike material objects. 

Most people will learn overtime that the only constant of life is change, and that loss is inevitable. However, no matter how well we understand this fact logically, the emotional part of our minds works independently of critical thinking. While grief is easy to control over the loss of objects, it is much more difficult to overcome the loss of an interpersonal relationship.

The structure of the poem is important to be taken into account, as it is directly related to the tone of the poem. In the initial 5 stanzas of the poem, the speaker expresses her attitude towards loss in a casual, dismissive tone, emphasizing with imagery and positive descriptions, how the magnitude of lost things does not affect her grievance over it. However, the tone shifts in the final stanza, where the speaker seems to come to an epiphany that things that they truly deemed of significance, were not easy to get over, such as the entity in the poem who is referred to as “you”. This is with reference to a person loved one the speaker has lost, and now misses deeply. 

From lines 1-15, the tone is nihilistic, rationalistic, and detached, which abruptly turns into vulnerable and illustrative of the speaker’s true feelings. In lines 1-15, the stanza all consist of 3 lines, until the shift starts at line 16, where the final stanza is composed of 4 lines instead of 3. The rhyme scheme also switches from ABA to ABAA, introducing the fourth line. This sudden change in the structure of the poem indicates a heavier importance being placed on the last stanza, or line 16-19, indicating that it is where the true feeling of the speaker lies. To add on, lines 1-15 all reference the loss of inanimate objects, such as door keys, places, names, their mother’s watch, houses, cities; while the final stanza is in reference to a human being, “you”. 

The poem suddenly becomes emotionally charged when this change in subject is introduced. The poem also captured the fact that the magnitude of the material item is not correlated to the emotional pain it should produce from losing it; she speaks with the same tone of dismissal for both the loss of her house keys and three of her houses. While these two objects are vastly differing in monetary value, she expresses it was not hard to get over the loss of either of them. 

She uses the repetition of the phrase; “losing isn’t hard to master”, in every stanza, to emphasize her indifference towards loss of these objects. Positive diction in phrases like “no disaster, accept the fluster, and practice losing farther,” are used for the inanimate objects. 

When the final stanza is reached, in lines 16-19, it is clear as to what kind of loss she mourns for; the invaluable loss of the presence of a person she loved. The stanza starts with a unique punctuation; 3 dashes, never been used before in the poem. An entity is introduced in the sentence “Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied.” The speaker was about to tie the entity “you” into her long rant about how she does not care about things she has lost, but fumbles over herself as she is reminded of the person’s qualities (which she thinks of in the brackets). Once the personal aspect of ‘the joking voice’ and gesture comes into play, the speaker’s tone shifts abruptly, becoming emotionally vulnerable and reminiscent. 

The speaker is reminded with the past memory of the person she lost, and she admits, by finishing the sentence with “I shan’t have lied”, that she cannot simply group the person in with all the rest of the objects in her rant. To conclude, the speaker’s attitude towards loss changes from indifferent and rationalistic to emotional and deep, once the subject of loss is changed from an inanimate object to a person they had a relationship with. This stark change is illustrative of the loving nature of human beings, how we are naturally wired to value interpersonal relationships over material objects, how the loss of a friend, or a family member brings us into grief more than the loss of something that can be replaced. 

This poem is particularly relevant today, in a culture where people are encouraged to be more materialistic, to not depend on anybody and love the capitalistic prostitute, money. Bishop contradicts all this and declares that she is indifferent to the loss of all things, things that can be regained, things that possess no life, no consciousness. She is simply faithful to her love for human beings, in this case a particular person, whose presence she longs for. 

While objects can be remade, human beings cannot ever be replicated, and we are each valued tremendously by those who love us; ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop poignantly captures this effect of the human mind, where we are inclined to emotional pain when faced with the loss of a person we love.

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