One Art
By Elizabeth Bishop
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.
3 Comments
bloody wonderful poem….. i can’t quite get the line ” i shan’t have lied”…but i’m not giving it much time to think either..have to get up and get brekkie…here in galway. M x
“I shan’t have lied” — I think she’s saying “losing you” is the greatest challenge to her claim that the art of losing isn’t hard to master, i.e. this is the most difficult personal loss of all, and yet it is still possible and not in fact a disaster. And that admitting it is not a disaster is part of mastering the art of losing.
“I shan’t have lied” is actually a key line because the whole poem is a challenge to the romantic falsehood that loss is unbearable and the end of the world. Bishop’s point is that the most difficult thing is to face the fact that loss IS bearable; life goes on.
Don’t know if that’s at all clear — just shows what a complex, brilliant poem it is!
Funny about the watch. I lost the broken, old, Seiko my Dad left. And now, I know it doesn’t matter. Not a whit. Were I to lose even one sweet memory of him, that would be tragedy. Life is in the moment.
Thanks for this poem.
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