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.

The speaker opens with these lines, which establish their overall argument for the poem. The speaker’s argument presumes that loss is inevitable, and therefore natural. Indeed, because “so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost,” loss cannot be considered a “disaster.” Even so, the speaker admits that just because loss is inevitable, that doesn’t mean it isn’t painful. This admission is more implicit than explicit, since the speaker doesn’t mention the pain of loss in any obvious way. Instead, they make a subtle gesture at the pain of loss when they declare, in the opening line, that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master.” The main reason a person would want to master the art of losing would be to develop greater control over their emotional response to loss. In other words, having mastery over the art of losing enables a person to diminish—and perhaps even eliminate—the pain that comes from loss.

Lose something every day.

In this statement in line 4, the speaker offers advice about how to master the art of losing. The key to mastering this “one art” is apparently quite simple: get in the habit of losing something every day. The speaker’s logic seems to be that if a person habitually loses things, then they’ll develop a greater tolerance for loss. A greater tolerance for loss will, in turn, enable them to avoid the full force of grief that typically comes with loss. A person can start by working to “accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent” (lines 4–5). Then, once they’ve practiced losing very basic things, they can advance to more significant losses: “places, and names, and where it was you meant / to travel” (lines 9–10). It’s worth noting that the speaker’s statement here is slightly ambiguous. Grammatically, it’s phrased as a command, though it seems to function more like a piece of advice or a personal aphorism. But then to whom is the advice or aphorism directed? To us readers? To the anonymous “you” they address in the final stanza? Or perhaps even to themself? This ambiguity cannot easily be resolved.
 

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.

Lines 13–15 make up the poem’s fifth stanza, which develops a line of thought first introduced in the fourth stanza. There, the speaker shifts from describing how to practice the art of losing to recounting several losses they themself have experienced in their life. The two losses documented in the fourth stanza are the speaker’s mother’s watch as well as a house they loved living in. In the fifth stanza, the speaker moves on to more substantial losses, including “two cities, lovely ones,” as well as “some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.” The speaker’s references here remain vague, and we readers can’t be sure what they mean when they say they lost a whole continent. However, what’s more important than the specifics of these losses is their sheer magnitude. As they move from describing smaller losses to larger ones, the speaker parallels the advice they gave in stanzas 2 and 3 about scaling up from minor to major losses. In this stanza, then, the speaker affirms their own mastery, even in the face of significant losses. They may “miss” what they no longer have, but the loss “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.

The poem concludes with these lines, in which the speaker addresses an anonymous “you.” We know very little about this “you.” However, we do know that the speaker cherishes them, as shown in the parenthetical where they describe this person’s “joking voice, a gesture / I love.” We also know that the speaker is preparing to lose this person, though for unknown reasons. The speaker’s impending loss of “you” forces a reconsideration of their preceding discourse on loss. Throughout the poem, the speaker has repeatedly insisted that it’s possible to manage one’s response to loss, and because of that, “loss is no disaster” (line 3). The speaker maintains this claim in the first half of the final stanza, where they imply that the loss of “you” won’t be a big deal. But the poem’s final lines give the opposite impression. Whereas the speaker has previously asserted that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” (lines 1, 6, and 12), here they soften that claim slightly: “the art of losing’s not too hard to master.” The softening of this claim ultimately leads the speaker to admit, however cautiously, that their impending loss of “you” in fact “may look like . . . disaster.”

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