Thursday, March 26, 2009

"One Art"


Elizabeth Bishop’s poem had a lasting impact upon me. Perhaps, we feel a deep connection to things we can relate to in our own lives. Who hasn’t felt the heavy, debilitating, crushing force of loss? Elizabeth Bishop talks about loss and we remember our own losses. We remember “lost door keys, the hour badly spent.” Bishop says so eloquently what we all want to say sometimes.


Truth is, we all lose what which we love in life. We lose door keys, we lose watches, we lose homes, we lose our roots and finally, we lose our loved ones. Loss progresses. We start by losing trivial things and then we lose things that have the ability to create a disaster in our lives. We “master” the art of losing because quite frankly, we have no choice. It’s an immutable feature of life. “So many things seem to be filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” Is it really not a disaster? Does the narrator force herself to believe this? She does indeed force herself to “write it!” How can it not be disaster then?

It is disaster but we don’t want it to be. We want to “accept the fluster,” we learn to “[lose] faster,” so loss becomes something that’s not hard to “master.” This works because then, we lose “vaster” things, and keep reminding ourselves that loss is “no disaster.”

But what is the art that Elizabeth Bishop is really talking about? Is it our ability to force ourselves to rationalize our situation without throwing ourselves into disaster? Sylvia Plath’s poem represents loss in a painful and horrific way. Sylvia Plath was not so concerned with rationalizing. Sylvia Plath killed herself at the age of 30. Is rationalizing our losses what ultimately keeps us sane and alive?

Through the mechanics of Bishop's poem, we see the narrator constricting herself. She is suffocated by her rationality. Her poem is a villanelle, difficult to write, and very controlled. The narrator is also very controlled. She forces herself to get over herself. Sylvia Plath forces herself upon us. We cared about Sylvia Plath because she forced us to care. We care about Bishop because we care about the realities of our own lives. Stifling our emotions makes us sad. Allowing our emotions to control us kills us. We’d rather be sad than dead.

The word “disaster” is repeated several times. The rhyme in this poem brings us back to this word. Disaster would readily define us if we allowed it to. We’re always leaning towards that state, being pulled towards it. And we resist. We resist disaster so much that even when it is disaster, we refuse to accept that it is. Accepting disaster would make reality swing back with great force, debilitating force.

I’ve read “Daddy” about a hundred times now. I keep trying to pull out every emotion and every word connected to that emotion. I keep trying to find one single unifying theme in Plath’s poem. It’s an outburst. It’s obnoxious. Then, I think about Bishop’s poem and realize that Plath’s poem is about losing control.

1 comment:

  1. This analysis seems to have been executed by a twelve year old, and rates approximately a 7 on the flesch-kincaid grade scale.

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