It appears as if Bishop is trying to force the second stanza to visualize with the philosophical ruminations of the first. The poet is teaching the readers how to master this art. In fact, they are urged to practice, to make it into a virtuous habit. Loss, art, master, and disaster—the lofty abstract delivery of the first stanza crumbles in the mockery of this near rhyme. The “lost door keys, the hour badly spent” become concrete entities and lost time. The refrain vulgarly collides with “fluster”, in an uneasy rhyme casting the very tone of the poem into doubt, we begin to wonder if it is possible to master fluster.
Bishop enforces an increasingly dynamic, almost uncontrollable, schedule of loss in the third stanza. It appears as if she is simply shifting the focus to the next lesson. No longer does Bishop tally manageable, sympathetic incidents; the poem has moved beyond them to over whelming concerns: places, names, and destinations. Each reader must supply concrete examples. The “intent” of the first stanza blossoms into the broader intentions of “where it was you meant / to travel” of the third stanza. Bishop continues to induce specific details from the reader as the pace and range grows. Soon drained of places, names, and travel plans, the reader must struggle to fill the lists.
After the impersonal professorial tone, the abrupt introduction of the word “I” requires immediate review of all that comes before this stanza. The poet's observed knowledge, suppressed in the first half of the poem, surfaces. This may be as the poet feels frustration in the audiences’ ability to comprehend these lessons of loss. It seems that Bishop draws to the heart of the matter by reminiscing an ultimate parting gift, her mother's watch, an artefact that links the living and dead, recalling a time, expressing a generation, thus making solid the feeling of irretrievable loss. Looking to the truth, depths and pain of this loss, Bishop, however, exploits what is, after all it is only one more ‘minor family relic’. The poet defers the threat of sentiment by the sweeping rhetorical gesture of “And look!” Her life, no longer a chaos of events, seems orderly and safe as Bishop records and schedules her losses: “my last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses went.” Her autobiography assumes an oddly reassuring linearity and predictability as the poem hurtles toward its closure.
The poet, further emboldened by self-knowledge, begins again in the fifth stanza with "I lost." The scale has tipped; forsaking the personal for "two cities, lovely ones" the poet supplies lineaments and character to these scenic vagaries. The poet approaches an unspecified, yet concrete, type of loss: “two rivers, a continent”. These losses suggest the impermanence, the unobtainable nature of the earth itself. Though there remains a tension between the public and private examples, the tension is ill defined and ill conceived. With the displaced utterance, Bishop conveys a struggle between growing self-knowledge and her poetic of reserve in this dialogue between the self and the lost.
The last stanza exposes the truth underpinning the poem – the loss of love here is not over and thereby mastered – loss is still an act being endured. The poet shows that in self-defence, lying makes a moral issue out of the heart’s existential dilemma; it is almost a habit of being. The real moral force of her stanza from her adverbs: “even” losing you, and not “too” hard to master. These shades of emphasis are so carefully composed that they show the true dramatic power of the poem.
“Even” connects this hierarchy of loss to that always poorly expressed world of extremity—without you, I can't go on, I can't live without you—those contracted conditionals meant to express the inexpressible love between two people. Here lies the true lesson of loss: "—Even losing you."
In the final stanza, the poet breaks out of the pattern of inanimate objects, and the poem directly addresses a “you”. Here conflict explodes as the verbal deviations from previously established word patterns reflect the consequences for the poet in remaining true to her initial claim, a claim that experience of loss can yield to mastery of it.
The separating of the words “a gesture / I love” across two lines seems a profession by itself as it turns back toward the beloved gesture. Syntax reveals the pain “One Art” has been fighting, since its beginnings to suppress, as the thought of losing "you" awakens an anxiety the poem must wrestle with down to its close.
In the line, “It’s evident / the art of losing's not too hard to master”, is the adverbial “too”. This increases the growing tension within the desire to repeat the poem's refrain while, on the other hand, admitting growing doubts as to its accuracy.
The word “shan’t” is used very effectively in the last stanza. This word, with its overformal stiffness and its old-fashioned sound, says both ‘I’m lying’ and ‘I’m not lying”; in one word she successfully combines opposite meanings in one utterance.
The poem has a theatrical last line commencing with a qualification, “though”. It continues on to a suggestion rather than the assertion we might expect of a last line “it may look”, then, it extends to a comparison that’s doubled. The repetition in the line: “like … like”, gives a stuttering feel, the poet’s voice literally cracks. Finally this is interrupted by a parenthetical injunction that is both a confession and a compulsion. This creates a mood for the final word, so that when “disaster” finally comes, it sounds with a shocking finality.
The directness that comes to dominate in Bishop's poem describes the relationship between the will and the world. “One Art” reveals an ironic playfulness that works in collusion with high seriousness, a strategy that grows throughout Bishop's work.
