Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" of Punctuation and Syntax

The dash that began the final stanza piqued my interest for Bishop's "One Art." Yes, just that dash. It definitely signified a pause of hesitation, but why did she need that pause, when the first five stanzas were so defiant? After the first read, focusing solely on deciphering the meaning of that dash, I came to the realization that the dash that I was so enamored with, was just another excellent use of punctuation in the whole poem. The dash definitely was special, because it basically turned the whole mood of the poem upside down, but it was not the only one that did its job exceptionally well. What's more, the first read brought to my attention the way sentences were broken into lines, especially "(the joking voice, a gesture/I love)." And I really thought that this poem wouldn't have hit me this hard, even though the subject was definitely relatable - we all lose things and people, if not for her clever uses of varying sentence/ line structures and punctuation.

The dropped words of all the stanzas before last (the ones that dropped to the next line before the sentences ended), for me, were used mostly to create suspense and/or mirror her train of thoughts. As an example, "the fluster/of lost door keys..." seemingly suggests a pause in her thought, when her mind starts wandering and looking for examples. In the last stanza, however, the dropped "I love" definitely suggests something deeper, the pause sounding almost like a sob of resignation to the fact that yes, that gesture of her lover was something that she loved and lost. Love is an emotion that comes with attachment, and this admission of love definitely goes against the "art of losing" that she has been preaching about for five sixths of the poem, an "art" that bases itself on a will to forget and detach from her losses. Similarly, that sweet dash at the beginning of the last stanza foreshadows the loss of the last stanza - something, or in this case, someone, that she is reluctant to discuss. This reluctance is immediately illuminated with "losing you", and everything comes together nicely in this moment of the poem. All that talk about losing being "the art [that] isn't hard to master" only sets the stage for the complete 180-degree turn. In this sense, the poem has become predictable. However, in the final line, "(Write it!)" happened and I am struck. The "one art", here, is writing then? Putting that one commanding sentence in parentheses and italicizing write after subtly (or not so subtly) throwing all her real emotions on the table ("the art of losing's not too hard to master"), Bishop has crafted most the steps of her grieving process - from denial to acceptance to, finally, writing about it. Isn't it perfect that finally, the thing that will probably get the writer through losses is writing? Back to punctuation and syntax, the parentheses clarify the internal nature of her command and the exclamation point, no surprise, creates the force for the command. Reading "One Art" was definitely a great journey, and it would not have been the same without Bishop's excellent use of punctuation and syntax.

~Huong T.