I remembered this one about a month ago when I re-viewed the movie In Her Shoes. One of the characters, a grown woman who thought her worth was only in her body, learns to read by reading this and other poems to a retired professor in a nursing home. Fairly cheesy plot, but great poem...
Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
1 comment:
I think that the poet had some correspondence with Flannery O'Connor. I think that is where I first ran across her. That kind of perspective would make sense with the kind of sensibleness (as opposed to sensibility, in Jane Austen's terms) of this poem. I think being able to lose things gracefully, and I mean that literally, is very important. Bishop never says that the losses are not losses, but that the losses should not be defining and limiting. There is in this poem the "and-ness" that I like so much, but not an indecisiveness. She comes down clearly on one side.
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