One Art

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Rhyme

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Literary Devices Rhyme

Bishop wrote “One Art” as a villanelle. Traditionally, the villanelle features just two rhymes for the entire poem. These rhymes repeat across the five tercets and the concluding quatrain, following a patterned schema: ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA. The A rhymes clearly dominate the poem, and they are associated with the villanelle’s two repeating refrains: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” (lines 1, 6, 12, and 18) and “to be lost that their loss is no disaster” (line 3; other versions of this refrain appear in lines 9, 15, and 19). All the other A rhymes end in the same “-aster” sound: for example, “faster” (line 7) and “vaster” (line 13). Likewise, the B rhymes, which appear in the middle of each tercet, all end with the same “-ent” sound: for example, “intent” (line 2) and “spent” (line 5). On the one hand, the simplification of the rhyme scheme creates a sense of obsessive focus—in this case, on “the art of losing.” Yet on the other hand, the speaker’s A rhymes constantly oscillate between the opposing concepts of mastery and disaster, which suggests a central instability in the poem.

This central instability is also reflected in the way Bishop plays with imperfect rhymes. Although many rhymes in the poem are exact, such as the repeating rhyme between “master” and “disaster,” other word pairs create slant rhymes. The term slant rhyme refers to instances where two words sound similar but don’t quite form an exact rhyming match. Slant rhymes typically occur when two words share the same consonants but use different vowels. In the case of “One Art,” slant rhymes appear in the third, fourth, and sixth stanzas. Notably, all the slant rhymes in the poem form with the word “master,” which the speaker variously pairs with “fluster” (line 4), “last or” (line 10), and “gesture” (line 16). The fact that “master” only ever forms an exact rhyme with the word “disaster” subtly implies the impossibility of mastery, despite the speaker’s insistence that loss “isn’t hard to master.”