One Art: Themes | SparkNotes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Inevitability of Loss

The speaker of “One Art” readily embraces the reality that loss is an inevitable part of life. Each individual will experience various types of loss—from the everyday losses of door keys and wasted hours, to the much more significant losses of cherished places and beloved people. It’s precisely because loss is inevitable that the speaker longs to master what they call “the art of losing.” The speaker’s logic seems to be that if they understand the inevitability of loss, it’s possible to mitigate the grief associated with it by practicing acceptance of every loss, big or small. The speaker envisions just such a practice in the second stanza, where they advocate that everyone should “lose something every day” (line 4). They take this principle further in the third stanza, where they describe scaling up in order to “practice losing farther” (line 7). In addition to the loss of everyday objects, the goal would be to practice accepting the loss of “places, names, and where it was you meant / to travel” (lines 8–9). Scaling up in this way could theoretically strengthen the practitioner emotionally and alleviate the painful burden of grief, despite the inevitability of loss.

The Inescapability of Grief

The speaker may accept the inevitability of loss, but they rail against the inescapability of grief. After all, they desire to master “the art of losing” for the purpose of avoiding grief. But the speaker seems to misunderstand the relationship between loss and grief, as evident in their lack of distinction between different types of loss. It’s annoying to lose a key, but a key can easily be replaced. By contrast, if you lose your mother’s watch, there’s no way to replace that particular object, since the new watch would never have actually belonged to your mother. Even so, the speaker implicitly denies that the loss of their own mother’s watch affected them adversely: it “wasn’t a disaster” (line 15). Though for most of the poem the speaker seems resolute in their belief that they can avoid grief by accepting loss, their resolution begins to falter at the end in lines 16–19, when they address the anonymous “you”:

—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.

Though the speaker clearly cherishes this anonymous “you,” they briefly persist in implying that losing this person won’t be “too hard” to deal with. In the final line, however, they at last admit the possibility that this loss in fact “may look like . . . disaster.”

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