Understanding "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop

A detailed look at the poem by a college prof

[@nyanidraw3745]

Hello ! I'm french and my english teacher asked as to learn by heart one of a few poems she collected. One of these poems is "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop, and just be reading it, I didn't get all the meaning of this poem. Thanks a lot for your analysis, it helped me a lot understanding this poem, that I now find beautiful !

[@nataliemorod9220]

Really helpful, thank you. (The poem still makes me a little sad though, but it's no disaster!)

[@harsimarchadha2185]

you genius

[@alvarorivas9896]

One interpretation I’ve heard (I think others too) is that Bishop is lying to herself convincingly throughout the whole poem pretending that loss doesn’t affect her, and at the end the mask slips and she falters.

[@SixMinuteScholar]

Love it! Yes, that makes sense. Thanks for that!

[@luvadamusic]

This poem makes my heart hurt. It brings tears to my eyes and puts a lump in my throat every time I read it. I love it!

[@AndrewLiao23]

wow. the "too" change was very subtle at the end but now that its pointed out its really cool. this is coming from a 10th grade student who really dreads english class but has to do poetry analysis, congrats this video has actually gotten me interested in this poem.

[@cristinamouchantaf5116]

lol me too

[@jackkerouak]

This poem is from 1976, so she had already lived in Brazil and returned to the United States at that time. So probably the realm, the lost continent she is talking about is South America. She also mentions two rivers, one of the cities she lived in Brazil was Rio de Janeiro, that means in portuguese "January River", so maybe this is also a reference. Having said that, maybe the loved one lost was Lota?

[@SixMinuteScholar]

Jack Kerouak Yes, you make a good point. I think you are right. :-)

[@frogmouth]

No it was Alice. You can tell from the drafts ,the blue eyes.

[@Stephanie-rg5ln]

I interpreted her losing her "mothers watch" as the time she could've spent with her mother, since her mother died when you was very young

[@SixMinuteScholar]

bad bitch Interesting! I'll reread with that idea in mind.

[@winniewang3846]

Amazing！Every time I listen to your explanation, I want to applaud for you from the bottom of my heart!

[@frogmouth]

Love the poem. I am very fond of rhyme. It's playful it's warm. The villanelle is so strict. I don't really know if the lost continent is North or South America, I prefer the idea of losing South America, but it really doesn't matter which way you read it. I identified with this because I have survived losing home after home, friend after friend, school after school as the child of itinerant parents. And my adulthhood has involved som big losses also. What I missed focusing on is the insertion of the word "too." . I really liked this analysis. I was a literature major in two languages and have heard more than my share of pretentious or patronising readings of poems. This is anything but. It's appreciative and insightful. Thankyou.

[@emmatreanor6619]

It's interesting how the villanelle form guides her to let go of her loved one- something I would have completely missed out on if I hadn't watched this video! :)

[@abooswalehmosafeer173]

non rien ne rien je ne regret rien because it's not hard to lose an art that unbeknown to me until I encounter Elizabeth Bishop on a far away Street in unearthly town become a celebration I lose I have lost mistake is the most reverential Guru..... losing is winning erring is learning... thanks.

[@anaelisarezende9184]

That´s a really beautiful poem. So sublime.

[@SixMinuteScholar]

I love it, too!

[@gustavocordero8537]

Love you new hair style :3 Continue your awesome poem reviews. Have a good day!

[@trythinking8967]

Yet by "writing it," by enumerating all these losses, the poet recovers them, in a sense. Her neurotically repetitive insistence that losing isn't "a disaster" belies her professed cavalier attitude about her irrevocable past. (We could imagine Hamlet stepping in with his snide "methinks the lady doth protest too much.") But in fact the speaker hasn't lost these things, she's preserved them, right here in her poem. As Shakespeare said about his own verse: "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.") In this way the poem is a kind of elegy to everything it claims to have lost, and so like so much of lyric poetry, it aspires to that paradoxical status of being a monument to transience. The art of losing isn't hard to master, sure, ok fine; but the art of poetry, of course, IS hard to master. It's hard to WRITE IT in a way that will, like love, "bear it out even to the edge of doom." And it's hard to make it look easy, which one must as this is a necessary requirement for all great art--I mean sprezzatura: that "certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it." As the poet labors to "write it"--the poem---she is simultaneously (and covertly!) laboring over her losses in order to make both not look (and feel!) like disasters. And I love your purple sweater.

[@drtreece36]

That was fantastic. I've always loved that poem but didn't quite get the "write it" ending completely but now understand. I don't think most would understand the genius of this poem - thanks to your analysis I do!!

[@happybird4942]

Always a pleasure to see you upload another poem analysis, Rebecca.

[@roshannair2118]

What a lovely reading of the poem. Thank you!

[@maryledbetter2320]

Thank you for sharing these insights! I'm teaching this poem twice this semester (in two separate classes), and you brought up points about the poem's structure that I completely missed. I appreciate your videos. : )

[@darkwind698]

Thanks for this! Just re-watched the masterful film Flores Rares aka "Reaching for the Moon" -- & have to agree with numerous critics who believe that Otto would have gotten a nomination -- & should have , if this movie hadn't been marketed as a "lesbian ghetto" niche film ... Yes it's soapy, but well done & aroused my & many other's interest in discovering a lot more about Bishop!

[@ceciliacrouzel]

So clear ! It's of My favourite one's ! Thanks for sharing 👏👏👏👏👏

[@IanBrownMakeUpArtist]

Thank you for sharing this beautiful analysis. It was delightful to watch and contemplate.

[@SixMinuteScholar]

Ian Brown You're welcome!

[@deboralins6419]

What an excellent reading of the poem. I loved your video, thanks for sharing your toughts.

[@stanleysmith3339]

Lovely, Lovely reflection "inexorable"

[@Paperflower.]

THANK YOU! this really helps me in my IGCSE studies. 😊

[@francescagatica2799]

Thanks for the analysis, Rebecca! I just read "One Art". I was wondering if you could also do an analysis of "Miriam" by Truman Capote. I would love you to explain that short story since it is a bit complex, in my opinion. Thanks in advance!

[@shrt3569]

Thank you for your simple& clear explanation . I enjoyed reading this poet because of you

[@SixMinuteScholar]

This makes me so happy!

[@majik1961]

It is very beautifully explained by Professor Rebecca. No sentence wasted. I interpret lines 2 and 3 like this: 'when you think deeply about all the things that you possess, you will see that you don't really 'own' anything. Maybe you have them for a time, but that is all. And that goes for EVERYTHING you possess: your youth, health, beauty, even the very body that you have and which you love, you give up eventually. So, learn to master the idea that you don't truly possess anything for always--or even better, that they were never truly yours at anytime. When the time comes for them to go, let them go without regret.

[@trishyouensceramics1709]

You missed it but when she said she lost her mother's watch she means that she forgot to have a baby and she had gone past menopause and she was too old to conceive one and she was maybe too busy in her younger life riding poetry and falling in love to think about starting a family.. I think it's one of the most important lines in the poem.

[@jbatalle1]

Thanks for your great comments!

[@SixMinuteScholar]

Joan B You're welcome -- thanks!

[@nisrineshaarani3763]

My all time favorite poem

[@ctn4646]

In a way, she might have possibly lost herself and is trying to convince herself, "(write it!)" that it's not a disaster.

[@SaeadS-fn7og]

I liked it .is easy to understand . I'm studying English literature and this is helpful

[@SixMinuteScholar]

Glad it was helpful!

[@SaeadS-fn7og]

@SixMinuteScholar can you help study through my exam will you be my tutor and set price

[@SaeadS-fn7og]

@@SixMinuteScholar pls 🙏 be my touter .

[@zakhrokoraboeva5139]

thank you. thank you so much!

[@ginaferreira8649]

Love this poem and this video made me love it even more. Thanks!

[@SixMinuteScholar]

Gina Ferreira Yes, me too! You're welcome!

[@christine_dopamine]

Your speech was so interesting I couldn't put it down

[@sattarabus]

Laudable explication of a villanelle that wears the mask of deceptive simplicity. Rebecca recites it with adroitness and sensitivity and does manage to inflect the word in parenthesis with muted emphasis. 'Write it!' in brackets is the key word that escorts you to the sanctum sanctorum of the poem. It is a self-directed imperative the execution of which shall preclude the loss of the poem . The Muse does not readily respond to an organized study with all the stationery laid out on the table in apple pie order. Poets under afflatus often scribble on napkins, tissue paper, scraps, or on the margin of the book or magazine in their hands. If you don't write it immediately, it's gone irretrievably. William Empson highlights the volatility of the creative act aptly in the following excerpt: It is the poems you have lost, the ills From missing dates, at which the heart expires. Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. The toxic waste consists of remorse, corrosive guilt, and implacable memory. The subtext of melancholy beneath the thin upper crust of self mockery and irony is very poignant. Each of us has been there before. I recommend Helen Dunmore,s 'Malarkey'. You've got the voice, Rebecca.

[@goooongo]

Thank you to help my english's assignment. Poem is one of the most difficlt one to study in english class(((

[@littlemisterio4893]

its too lovely thank you soo much 💕🥺

[@toharonyeulo2441]

Thank you!

[@marianamartinezjimenez1575]

magnificent explanation!

[@zoobee]

a lovely analysis. thank you. please do make more vids.

[@SixMinuteScholar]

Jay Paul I will! When my winter vacation comes, I'll make a few for sure!

[@ctn4646]

What if the "you" or" joking voice" she's referring to, is actually herself? I sometimes joke to myself lol ...talk amongst yourselves lol

[@adamjeffries7235]

her lover who killed herself

[@hannahswift443]

this was super helpful- thank you :)

[@purplereignxo]

Thank you so so so much!! ❤️

[@stevesearlsspeaks8931]

I enjoy your explication, but feel that Bishop was not making a claim that loss occurs and we must find ways to overcome the losses we suffer in life. No, it to me is deeply ironic, as if she wrote this from the POV of a person (as we know she was) dealing with a very specific loss, and Bishop is addressing not just an anonymous reader, but herself throughout the poem. I see her working through feelings that are unbearable, first by treating losses as nothing special, as so many of us are told to do these days in the face of any loss. She begins the poem as a person in denial, repressing sorrow, but also revealing the wound as she works her way through the various losses she describes. She begins by speaking first of minor losses, which all of us deal with on a daily basis, and gradually, as she speaks of loss, she writes of things she's lost that we know, are not that easy to endure, to master, as it were.. The poem turns at the point she speaks of her mother's watch, for that abrupt beginning to the 4th stanza is a symbol, not just of a losing a treasured possession, but of death. For what are such treasured objects, but momento mori, i.e., an object kept to both remind us of the person who is no longer with us, but also of the inescapable truth that death comes to us all? From that point on the poem speeds up, becomes more abstract in places, such as her choice of "realms" as one of the things she's lost. We are watching as she tries, tries, but fails, to escape her grief, which becomes obvious in the last stanza, that this art of lsoing cannot addrees the loss of someone she loved deeply. And though she end the poem still asserting losing isn't difficult to master, in my view, her final line makes clear that some losses, no matter how much practice we've had with loss in our lives, are disasters. And that is the irony revealed right there, for this art of losing she tells us so much about is not an art at all, but a ploy, a tactic, a defense mechanism, used to repress emotions she cannot face, to deny feelings she cannot endure, involving the greatest loss most people face in life, the loss of those they hold most dear. That final final line changes the original repetend in the second stanza, from a loss that is "no disaster," to one that now proclaims, in fact (as the parenthetical admonition to herself, "Write it! forces her to say) "may look like .... like disaster."

[@fizzaaslam2786]

its good

[@deldel9908]

Thanks! It was really helpful :)

[@gino2868]

Hello, do you do novel analysis by chapters? If not, have you ever given any thought to that? I love your vids, thank you!

[@SixMinuteScholar]

Pariston What a good idea! I will think about that. Thanks!

[@gino2868]

I think that if you do start doing t, there's not going to be any better analysis! Your videos are amazing. I recommend starting with a classic :) Maybe Dorian Gray?

[@AAwildeone]

Ya can't read that in a cute jaunty sweater with an off-kilter painting behind you

[@AAwildeone]

When you read a poem like that TO PEOPLE in order to deliver a lecture, it's not only an aesthetically repugnant thing, it's alllmost morally a bad thing....tell us about your day...did some old lady beat you with her umbrella? JUST PLEASE don't read someone else's great work into a webcam as if the sole reason it was written was to give you something to talk about to other incredibly lovely people

[@waffleman4503]

what lol

[@leena5573]

wtf