One Art: Key Poetic Devices

Apostrophe

Apostrophe (uh-PAW-struh-FEE) is a rhetorical figure in which a speaker makes a direct and explicit address, usually to an absent person or to an object or abstract entity. In “One Art,” Bishop uses apostrophe in a surprising and powerful way. It’s surprising primarily because it appears at the end of the poem. Over the course of the first five stanzas, it appears that the speaker is just thinking aloud to themself. Then, in the final stanza (lines 16–19), the speaker suddenly addresses another person:

—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.

The speaker’s unexpected address to an unnamed “you” suggests that they may have been speaking to another person all along. It isn’t clear whether this person is actually present, or if the speaker addresses them in absentia. It also isn’t clear whether this person’s impending disappearance from the speaker’s life is due to a parting of ways or, more tragically, death. But regardless of these uncertainties, what’s so powerful is the way the “you” only appears at the end, forcing the reader to reconsider everything that came before. Upon a second reading, then, the reader understands the speaker’s discourse on “the art of losing” specifically in relation to their future loss of “you.”

Parenthetical Statements

“One Art” features two prominent uses of parenthetical statements. In writing, parentheticals serve two primary functions. They can be used to give examples or make clarifications of something discussed in the main text. They can also be used to comment on whatever is going on in the main text. Bishop makes use of both functions in lines 16–19, the final stanza of “One Art”:

—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.

The first parenthetical notes a characteristic of the anonymous “you” that the speaker loves and will miss most once they’re gone. Considering how the speaker has thus far avoided naming specific details about what they’ve lost, these details are striking and poignant. The second parenthetical implicitly identifies the speaker as a writer. This identification encourages the view that Bishop herself is the speaker. However, what’s most significant about the second parenthetical is the way it interrupts the thought being expressed in the final line. There, the speaker admits that the impending loss of the “you” addressed in the stanza’s first line “may look like . . . disaster.” Yet the speaker is clearly reluctant to make this admission, as evidenced by the fact they parenthetically command themself to write the very word they’d prefer to avoid: “disaster.”

Refrain

A unique feature of the villanelle is the fact that it features two refrains. In poetry, the term refrain refers to any word, phrase, line, or group of lines that gets repeated over the course of a poem. Each of the villanelle’s two refrains consists of a complete line that repeats at specified positions in the poetic sequence. Whereas both refrains appear in the first and last stanzas, only one refrain appears in each of the middle stanzas, where they occupy the final line of every tercet in an alternating schema. What results is a braiding pattern that creates a powerful link between the two refrains—a link made yet more powerful considering that a villanelle’s refrains rhyme with each other. In “One Art,” Bishop uses the refrains to powerful effect. Each refrain has a key word: “master” in the first one, and “disaster” in the second. The contrast between these words sets up the poem’s central instability, implicitly asking whether the speaker’s interest in mastering the art of loss is, in fact, courting disaster. Bishop amplifies this sense of instability by not repeating the refrains verbatim, but rather manipulating them in both minor and major ways throughout the poem.

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