Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” is a poem about loss, and to Bishop, it seems that loss is an art that must be perfected. From losing keys to long lost memories, to family heirlooms and old homes, the list of things the narrator has lost in her life gets progressively more serious. Bishop uses the villanelle form where the first and third lines of the first tercet are repeated in the third line of each tercet. In the last stanza, these two lines are repeated together as the final two lines. The repetition accentuates the frequent occurrences of loss. The loss of trivial things is often; hence, it is not hard to master. In the concluding stanza, Bishop states that even losing the person that the reader presumes to be her lover was easy. However,
