Today, we finish up our poetry unit, going over my all-time favorite poem, Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art.”
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Every year I teach this, after we read it and define the unknown words (“vaster” is always in that list; “fluster” and “realm” are there from time to time), I have the kids jot down questions at the bottom of the page. “What strikes you as odd about this poem? In some ways it seems really simple, but there a few things that just seem out of place. What are those things?” The same questions appear every year — the same questions I want to appear:
- Does she mean she really lost houses? How are we to understand that?
- What does she mean, she lost cities? And a continent? What does that mean?
- What’s up with that parenthesis in the last line?
- And why is “Write” in italics?
- Why does she begin that final stanza with a — what is that? A hyphen?
I get them working in groups after I point out a few more things:
- I give a brief refresher on imperative voice and the implied “you” subject they contain.
- I suggest they might want to consider who this “you” is.
- I point out that there is a “you” in the poem later and ask them to consider if it’s the same “you” as earlier in the imperative mood sentences.
- I help them see that there is another imperative in the final line. “Do you think it’s the same implied ‘you’ as the first imperative passages?”
- I remind them that there are often patterns in poetry. “I’m not just talking about rhyme schemes,” I clarify. “There’s a pattern in the meaning of the poem.”
They break into groups to work. Soon enough, someone notices the pattern: “Everything she loses keeps getting bigger and more significant.” Exactly.
At this point, I add a new twist I saw in the poem. (Great poetry is always revealing something new about itself.) The first word of the final stanza is deceptively ordinary. “Even.”
“Think about how you use ‘even’,” I suggest. “You might say something like this. ‘We’ve all finished the test. Even Steve is done.’ What does that mean?”
“That we’re surprised Steve finished,” someone answers.
“Why?”
“Because we don’t expect it.”
With some more group work, they figure it out. And then someone always states the obvious: “Oh, I see, Mr. Scott. It’s a break-up poem.”
Exactly. But such an exquisite break-up poem…
