I found Elizabeth Bishops villanelle “One Art”, enjoyable to read because of the way she masterfully uses the form explore themes of loss and grief. Bishop treats losing as a practice that you learn to master over time with many experiences. I was curious what she means by “mastering” the art of losing. Perhaps it means to accept the loss and move on with life with, accepting that it wasn’t a disaster, but a natural and inevitable part of life. But would more experiences with such heavy emotions necessarily help you?  The speaker declares that losing things isn’t hard to master and encourages the audience to try out losing something everyday. She speaks from her own experience, starting out by suggesting to love tangible and simple things like keys and time. However, in the next stanza, she tells us to lose “farther” and “faster”, such as places and names. In this sense, I felt that losing implies forgetting the memories of the places and names since you can’t physically lose them. She once again reiterates that losing and forgetting will not bring disaster, but might even a peace of mind. The speaker then says she lost even larger things that holds more meaning such as the mother’s watch and loved houses, instilling emotions and nostalgia into the loss. Even larger, rivers and continents, and finally, losing “you,” which I interpreted to be the speaker’s beloved. The progression of increasing loss made me feel like the speaker was direly holding on to her own philosophy that losing isn’t hard to master. The repetition of the last lines the art of losing isn’t hard to master served as a reminder to not just audience, but more so herself. The last stanza felt like an interruption of the poem’s form and message with the dashes and parentheses. While the first five stanzas suggest that the speaker has already mastered the art of loss and is teaching her audience, the last stanza reveals that it is still an ongoing process for the her as she copes with the loss of her beloved or the possibility of it. Her repetition was not a lie, but something she wants to believe that she can overcome and master this art.