One Art Villanelle

A villanelle form is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five three groups followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first group repeated alternately until the last stanza. The last stanza usually includes both repeated lines. The poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishops uses a villanelle form that emphasis on one’s losses and how you cope with it. The form of the poem is related to the subject matter because it brings attention to how one is convincing themselves not to break down when everything is falling apart. The poem “One Art”, by Elizabeth Bishop begins with a bold claim such as “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” (Bishop 1.1). The speaker suggests that everything …show more content…
The constant repetition of two rhymes really makes it easier for readers to follow along and keep interested. It is very simple poem yet so powerful. The last stanza of the poem is what reveals everything that the poet was going through. We discover that she has lost her recent loved one, but that doesn’t matter to her because she has lost everything in her life. She survived without everything else and evidently she will survive without her ex-lover. When the poet wrote “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” (Bishop 4.4) is when the poet finally revealed that she has feelings. Throughout, the poem she brushed it off the fact that anything ever affected her, but in this stanza we see that she is urging not to break down as she wrote “(Write it!) like disaster”. All and all this form really helped the readers understand the character and the problems she has faced. If this poem was written in any other form, we wouldn’t be able to see