Yay and Yayer

Yay and Yayer

  • Submitted By: jmg005
  • Date Submitted: 03/02/2009 11:15 PM
  • Category: Miscellaneous
  • Words: 606
  • Page: 3
  • Views: 334

In the poem One Art by Elizabeth Bishop, the speaker shows the audience that losing things is infinitesimal compared to losing the one she loves. She reveals herself through repetition and metaphor, but it is mostly her diction that tells her feelings
In the first line she says “The art of losing isn’t hard to master”. The line sets up the mood that losing things is easy. Though by repeating it in lines 6 and 12, she puts emphasis on the words and seems to want that line to be the truth. In the last repetition of the first line, she adds the word “too”. This means that it is hard to master, to some extent, though the end result “may look like…disaster (line 19)” She further backs it up her original statement by saying that their intent is “to be lost” (line 3), saying that things are meant to be lost, no matter what happens. She instructs the audience to “lose” and “accept” (line 4), which suggests that she has gone through loss before and it would be better to accept losing things since it would not hurt as much. She then instructs the audience to “practice” (line 7) losing, so her heart will not be crushed when the audience is accustomed to losing. By line 6, the speaker gets frantic. Her words become careless and the words take a sort of rhythm. She says “losing farther, losing faster”. Both phrases start with the word losing and start with the letter f. She then loses “places, and names, and where it was [she] meant / to travel” (lines 8-9). She lost more important things, but they were bearable. At this point, she is still talking to her original audience. When she says “And look! My last, or / next-to-last” (line 10), the exclamation point indicates a careless abandon. The fact that she can’t point out any details of the item she lost shows she doesn’t care about it and it doesn’t matter. She starts using the first person, saying that the items she lost were hers. She starts out losing small things like “lost door keys, the hour badly spent”. Then she lost...

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