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 a disaster.
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 a disaster.
Elizabeth Bishop
How will you interpret the poem? What do you think author is
telling us? Please could you comment?
I must enhance my capability to deal with blogs, this is the second time I try to publish... ;-(
ReplyDeleteThe poem of E. Bishop is beautiful and can be interpreted in different ways. There is indeed a progression. Losing some trivial things like "door keys" or even "places and names" can be an opportunity to remember how much we feel tied to other people and other things. People because we love them, they are part of our inner life; things because they are the traces that the people we love have shared with us, given to us. We are building a civilization that is increasingly material. We accumulate objects of all sorts as they actually become the mediated way we use to communicate with other human beings (e.g. computers, social networks, telephones etc.) while the truth is that we less and less enjoy direct communication. Person-to-object and object-to-person represent most of the communications today, and soon object-to-object communications will prevail, allegedly to "speak" for us or on our behalf.
But when we start losing our most cherished "things" - "the realms I owned" - the disaster is not far! Ultimately we may lose "the joking voice, a gesture I love" - the "you"! The disaster is there!
The art of losing is the strategy we choose to make that people around cannot detect that our life has become a disaster. Because losing what is dear to us is unspeakable, there are no words to describe it. Because we respect people who are around and we do not want to transfer onto them the marks of our grief. Because the only way that exists to continue giving life to what we have lost is just to continue living and carrying with us, within us, the memories of our past. Disaster cannot be described, cannot be shared, cannot even be thought. Like darkness. So we stand up and live as if nothing had changed, or little, but in fact we desperately need a lot of art to co-habit with the idea of what has been lost.