Sign Inventory, Week 2

One Art, Elizabeth Bishop

*The speaker delineates a series of nondescript items to lose: “lose something everyday,” door keys, places, names, future travel sites, houses, cities, continents, so forth.

* The speaker mentions losing her mother’s watch--the most and only specific item listed in the poem to lose.

* The line, “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” appears repeatedly (four times) in the poems to not only complete a formal technique but a personal mantra the speaker habitually states.

*The speaker states that at art of losing must be practiced and infers that the ‘art’ is not inherent.

* The poem includes two asides: “(the joking voice, a gesture / I love)” and “(Write it!)” that signal as textual reminders to the speaker to remember versus lose.

*The speaker only directly mentions once in the poem her emotions about losing remembrances/places/people: “[…] I owned, two rivers, a continent, / I miss them” and then end the poem with a nod to the visual over emotional ties: “the art of losing’s nor too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster”

*The speaker’s convictions about the art of losing falter in the final stanza as she states that the art of losing is not too hard to master.

*The speaker only direct comment on emotion about losing comes after losing two rivers, a continent, and cities and not after losing her mother’s watch, a item typically regarded as sentimental, a symbol of maternal lineage, a familial marker, so forth.

*The speaker states in the first stanza that physical items inherently possess the intent to be lost, therefore, instilling inhuman items with humanistic qualities.

*The speaker appears to thinks in physical relations and localities in regards to things lost, beginning with the domestic then “farther, [and] faster,” expanding to realms, continents, and rivers.