Holmes 1
Prompt 4: Tone
There is a change in tone in each of the six stanzas of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art.” Why does the tone change? In your explanation of why the tone changes, make sure to explain how we know it changes, referring to both the poem’s content and its structure.
Stacey Holmes
Professor DuVarney
EN 101
October 4, 2007
Tone in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”
Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “One Art” is at odds with itself. On one side is the content—a set of repeating lines that assures the reader, “the art of losing isn’t hard to master.” On the other side, in straight opposition to the speaker’s words, is the poem’s tone. Through careful word choice, punctuation, the villanelle form, and the breaks from that form, Bishop develops a tone that reveals the pain, heartache, and true turmoil associated with loss that her words are trying to disguise. With each new stanza there is a tonal change, and as the space between what is being said and how it is being said widens, Bishop’s ultimate theme about loss and its effect surfaces.
“One Art” begins with the tone, form, and content in perfect harmony. In a standard villanelle, each stanza contains three lines, with the first and last line of the first stanza creating a backbone for the poem, as these are the lines that reappear and repeat throughout the rest of the poem. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” opens the poem, and its twin, “to be lost that their loss is no disaster,” referring to the plethora of items lost, echoes this sentiment. This stanza carries a tone that is nothing but direct, calm, and controlled. The rhyme words, “master” and “disaster” are straightforward, both lines contain the same number of feet, and there is a sharpness to the assonance (art, hard, master, that, disaster) that conveys a clear, thought-out delivery. Bishop’s first stanza statements tells the reader that losing is not difficult, and because she adheres to the villanelle form, uses short, punchy words, and crafts measured lines, she is able to speak these lines in such a tone and voice that we believe her.
Picking up speed, the second stanza takes the notion of “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” one step further, but the tone cannot keep the beat and the first hint of dissension appears. As if delivered by an unreliable speaker, line four of the poem is too packed and too quick-moving, making the reader rethink the certainness of “the art of losing isn’t hard to master.” An extra half foot is added to the line, but it looks longer on the page, pushed out far past the next two lines end stops. Multiple-syllable words are piled onto one another (“something every day”) and because the line ends with “accept the fluster” the reader is forced to make a hurried turn to the next line to answer the question “the fluster of what?”. Finally, the slant rhyme of “fluster” and “master” adds one more component to this already disjointed, slightly irregular line. Bishop, eager to steady the tone and continue to prove her initial thesis, returns to the villanelle form and closes the stanza with a standard repetition of the poem’s first line. Despite this regrouping, the poem’s tone moves away from assuredness and becomes more defensive and forced.
Three major shifts occur in the center of the poem, and with each shift the ocean between what the speaker says and what she really thinks becomes evident. Firstly, the villanelle form breaks loose of its rigid pattern. The third line of the third stanza should be a straight repetition of the third line of the first, “to be lost that their lost is no disaster.” Instead, it is abbreviated and altered, and the meat of the line instead reads, “None of these will bring disaster.” Additionally, with each tercet Bishop adds to the poem, she pushes the content and tone in opposing directions with her careful rhyme. In the second stanza there was the slant rhyme (fluster/master) and now in the fourth, she pushes even further by matching up “master” with “last, or.” As Bishop disrupts a form as strict as the villanelle with off-rhymes, she signals to the reader that the speaker’s call for order, acceptance, and mastery over loss is, likewise, disrupted.
The second shift involves the laundry list of lost objects that builds in intensity and importance. The speaker originally tells the reader to practice losing tangible objects, like door keys. The next lost item she lists is an hour badly spent—notice the slight build up here from a loss that is an annoyance, but fixable, to a loss of a hour, which is irretrievable, although still not too grave. Suddenly, the list of lost items comes to include places, names, even your destiny, “where it was you were meant/ to travel.” With each added item, the weight and burden of loss increases, making it impossible to see loss as something so unrelated to disaster. The poem has suddenly gone from being about things loved and lost, to things and people loved, lost, and mourned.
The final shift, and the most telling tone change in the poem, is when Bishop brings uses the word “I,” “I lost my mother’s watch.” The tone is no longer removed or generic, but involves an “I”. The speaker is not someone delivering advice to the reader about loss, she is someone who is coping with loss herself, someone who really has the desire to believe that losing is not a disaster, but who isn’t fully there. Bishop follows the introduction of the “I” in the poem with two other related inclusions that help to further clarify who this “I” is and what she is feeling—dramatically changing the poem’s tone. First, there is an exclamation point, "And look!” which demonstrates a sense of urgency in the speaker to hurry pass the pain of the lost watch and direct attention elsewhere. The exclamation mark signals that a change has occurred in the poem—the speaker is no longer building an argument, she is now trying to push the poem to its close as quickly as possible. Solidifying this argument is her change in diction after the exclamation. Before, all lost items were unmodified— places, names, door keys, a watch of her mother’s. Now, the cities lost are not just any cities, they are “lovely ones.” Just as the form breaks, the rhymes slant, and the lines spill into the next, the tone of the poem follows suit, going from calm and steady to urgent, desperate, and nostalgic.
By the end of the poem it becomes apparent that the speaker will not be able to regain the even tone she once held, but she also does not continue her charade of holding back her heartache over loss. Instead, the poem closes with a tone of confession and release. As if the speaker (and the reader, too!) has been holding her breath, rushing over her pain to convince herself that she is okay, the last stanza acts as a deep sign of acceptance. It is in this final stanza that we learn why the speaker is speaking—she has lost someone, and though it is offset in parentheses, she provides information about this “you,” “the joking voice, a gesture/ I love.” She does use the rhyming couplet to end the poem, but it is modified to signal that there has been a change since the poem’s start. Bishop relinquishes the speaker from her struggle for mastery, and has her admit, “I shan’t have lied. It’s evident/ that art of losing isn’t too hard to master (italics my own). The “too” flips the original statement on its head and let’s the reader know that, indeed, the art of losing is hard to master, and even though she still needs to force herself to say it (Write it!) loss does in fact look like disaster.
A remarkable arc of meaning and theme takes place in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” The poem begins as a level-headed, even tempered diatribe on how loss can be mastered and the form, content, and tone, work together in unison to support this theme. By the poem’s end, the form has wiggled free of its strict shape, the tone has shifted from self-assured and heart-hardened to unsteady and heartsick. Bishop uses each stanza in between to slowly prepare the reader for this arc by subtly playing with the poem’s rhymes, punctuation, diction, and content. The result of Bishop’s carefully planned delivery is a poem that serves as evidence of the indivisibility of form, tone, and content as a way to achieve meaning. Much more than components added on to a poem’s content, the form and tone of “One Art” do not add an “extra layer” of meaning to the words of a poem, but are elements integrated into that poem that are responsible for delivering the poem’s theme that loss, despite its commonness and frequency in ours lives, defies logic and refuses to be something that is mastered.