One Art: Motifs | SparkNotes

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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Negation

As a villanelle, “One Art” features the use of two refrains, both of which are structured by negation. The first refrain proclaims that, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” (line 1). The second refrain takes slightly different form each time it appears, but the essential message stays the same: “loss is no disaster” (line 3). Since every stanza of a villanelle ends with one or both of these refrains, every stanza in “One Art” concludes with an example of negation. In each case, the speaker uses negation as a strategy for minimizing the pain of loss. For example, consider the fifth stanza (lines 13–15):

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.

Despite describing significant losses in the first two lines, the speaker concludes with a negation that radically minimizes those losses. By the end of the poem (lines 17–19), however, the force of the speaker’s negations begins to weaken:

It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Here, the speaker softens the original, more declarative form of the first refrain by saying that “losing’s not too hard to master.” Then, in the poem’s final line, the speaker fully removes the negation from the second refrain, hesitantly admitting that the loss of their beloved “you” in fact “may look like . . . disaster.”

Lost Objects and Places

Several times in the poem the speaker references particular objects and places they’ve lost during their life. The speaker makes these references to illustrate the kinds of loss that might be handled more gracefully if one manages to master “the art of losing.” For instance, the speaker says they lost their mother’s watch. They also explain that they’ve lost cherished places, such as “my last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses” (lines 10–11), along with “two cities” (line 13), and “some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent” (line 14). Given that the speaker concludes the poem by addressing an anonymous “you” whom they love and soon will lose, it’s surprising that they focus primarily on lost objects and places. Arguably, it is the loss of this beloved person that motivates the speaker’s meditation on the art of losing. But if that’s the case, then why do they discuss other forms of loss? One answer might simply be that the loss of this beloved person has caused the speaker to think about grief in a more general way. Alternatively, they may be focusing on the loss of objects and places as a strategy for avoiding a deeper grief.

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