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Good morning.

‘One Art’ is perhaps Elizabeth Bishop’s most famous poem. It’s a fine example of the fixed poetic form called the villanelle, with five three-line verses followed by one four-line verse. There’s a tight pattern of repeated rhymes and lines throughout the verses. This repetition focuses in ‘One Art’ on the line ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’ and the corresponding rhyme with ‘disaster’. The poetic form imposes a structure on an escalating range of things which are lost: door keys, an hour, names, treasured possessions, a sense of belonging in a place; until the last verse, when there is a loved ‘you’ who has been lost. The speaker is not convincing when she suggests she has mastered the art of losing her lover, and implies all losses are equal. She has to command herself to ‘write it’, that it looks ‘like disaster’.

A year ago today we woke up to both the reality and the possibility of many losses. Some were temporary: of freedom to travel; to meet people; to work; to shop. Some would be permanent: the loss of businesses; of the experience of study; most painfully, of those we knew and loved. As Bishop’s poem suggests, it is part of the human condition to experience loss, and ‘mastering’ these losses may well be what we long to be able to do. Perhaps on the outside that’s how it has looked and continues to look, in the same way that Bishop’s use of the constraints of the villanelle form seems to control the rising sense of bereavement. ‘One Art’ quietly, implicitly, acknowledges that some losses are indeed ‘disasters’ which may have to be lived with, even if never fully mastered.

Loving God, be our comforter in loss and our companion in sorrow. Help us to share one another’s burdens, whatever they may be. Amen.