Close and Slow Pt.9
A Weekly Appreciation of Poetry
Many of us feel a bit inadequate when it comes to reading poetry, perhaps suspecting that there is some higher learning or personal initiation required to appreciate verse. ‘Close and Slow’ is a regular feature here on ‘New Grub Street’ providing some pointers as to how to read and enjoy poetry, taking an individual poem for each post and highlighting some ways in which it can be read. I trust that these articles might open poetry to those keen to read it but a little overwhelmed- and provide a mustering point for those of us already convinced of the centrality of poetry to life. Previous editions of ‘Close and Slow’ can be read here.
‘One Art’ - by Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop is a major literary figure of the twentieth century. A peer and close friend of Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore, her work is of importance to any understanding of American literature and the nature of poetry in the last one hundred years. In this week’s ‘Close and Slow’, we are taking time with ‘One Art’, a poem which helpfully showcases Bishop’s range, her ability to negotiate with form, and her poetry's subtle yet powerful emotional life.
In most editions of ‘Close and Slow’, we follow a regular pattern in approaching each poem:
Listen to the voice of the poem
Put form first
Identify clear themes
Piece it all together
Listen to the voice of the poem
Analysis is important when it comes to understanding poetry, but it is always secondary to attentive listening. Poetry affords a space to slow things down, to call a halt on the world passing us by at breakneck pace, and invites us into a steady gaze on some aspect of the world or our existence. Rushing through the process, racing to the punchline of a poem, or viewing verse as a ‘mere’ means of communication is to deny poetry one of its historic functions in the human psyche and in society. Poetry demands breathing space and asks us to spend as much time in the silence between its lines as on the words themselves.
With all of this in mind, it is good to take time with ‘One Art’, reading it slowly, repeatedly, audibly or in any other way that is helpful to us personally.
2. Put form first
Poems can vary in terms of how strictly they adhere to literary form and conventions. In previous instalments of ‘Close and Slow’ we have encountered very strictly metred and managed poetry, as well as more ‘free’ expressions; we have measured rhythm and marked rhyme, registering the care and craft that writing good poetry requires.
This week, I want to lift just one aspect from ‘One Art’ - the fact that it is a villanelle. If we are unfamiliar with this kind of poem, Elizabeth Bishop’s work is one of the very best places to begin. The history and heritage of villanelles lies in balladry, in the kind of popular songs that would have been common in peasant communities before the twentieth century. Over time, these ‘ballads’ began to carry specific features that in turn became poetic rules. The villanelle form is thus rich in history and fairly rigid in expression.
Eavan Boland and Mark Strand provide us with the best summary I can find of what a villenelle is:
-It is a poem of nineteen lines.
-It has five stanzas, each of three lines, with a final one of four lines.
-The first line of the stanza is repeated as the last line of the second and fourth stanzas.
-The third line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the third and fifth stanzas.
-These two refrain lines follow each other to become the second-to-last and last lines of the poem.
-The rhyme scheme is ABA. The rhymes are repeated according to the refrains.1
This is a lot of information, and it is best to read it in conjunction with the poem itself:
We can see that Bishop has both adhered to and slightly tweaked the villanelle form. She is faithful to the rhyme scheme, as outlined above, and has maintained the ordering of lines fairly strictly, but for the sake of the flow of the poem, has regularly altered the line ending in ‘disaster’. In taking this approach, the poet retains the lyrical and musical elements of the villenelle form while rendering the syntax of the poem into more modern and natural phrasing.
As a result of its melodic buoyancy, it is easy to overlook the sheer skill involved in writing a villenelle. ‘One Art’ is viewed as one of the finest examples of the form, and we can readily see why it continues to be held in such high esteem. Bishop injects heartstopping emotion into lines that sing, into a rhythm and rhyme scheme which lilts and lulls the reader.
Literary criticism has highlighted the villanelle’s refusal to make linear progress on the themes it deals with. Instead, the use of refrains makes the logic of the poem circular and rotational. Reading a villenelle aloud can help us to grasp the cyclical tone of voice the poem adopts and allow us to feel the emotions described as well as to process them intellectually. This formal feature is of great significance to what Bishop is saying in the poem, as we will see below.
Poetic form still matters, despite efforts in the twentieth century to see it as antiquated and limited. The restrictions that form imposes can often (ironically) liberate the poet’s voice and allow the way of writing to emphasise, undermine or simply register what is being communicated. By the time that Bishop was writing ‘One Art’, villenelles had fallen on fairly hard times, but her adoption and development of it both dignify the form and beautify her work.
3. Identify clear themes
The chief theme of ‘One Art’ is processing loss, even profound loss. Bishop begins with trivial things such as ‘door keys’ or ‘the hour badly spent’, and moves from there to more significant bereavements. We have a hint of the poet’s losses in stanza four, where she refers to losing her mother’s watch. In common with the Louis MacNeice and John Montague poems previously examined in ‘Close and Slow’, Elizabeth Bishop incorporates the difficult loss of her mother within this work. Bishop’s father died when she was eight months old, and her mother was institutionalised when the poet was barely five. A lost ‘mother’s watch’ therefore carries a hint that this ‘art of losing’ touches the very deepest parts of who we are as humans and how we live.
Taking time to mark the escalation of losses in the poem is deeply affecting, graduating from a watch to three loved houses, to two cities, to rivers, to entire continents. The repeated insistence that this art isn’t hard to master, that these losses are not a disaster, begins to ring false to our ears - as though the villenelle form is refusing to accept the line that the poet seek to draw under trauma.
This is articulated most powerfully in the closing four-line stanza where the loss is now personalised to an individual, and the last line breaks the ‘fourth wall’ of the poem, allowing us to witness the struggle that Bishop feels in losing this beloved person,
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.
4. Piece it all together
Spending time with the poetic skill and the authentic human emotion of this piece is enriching, but also helpful to us in our own losses. The formal structure of villanelle draws us in as readers, through its musical fluency disarms our refusal to emotionally engage, and peels back the layers of our denial by undermining the poet’s insistence on mastering disasterless grief.
Boland and Strand summarise this helpfully,
Bishop’s choice of the villeanelle to formalise this heartbreaking catalogue of losses emphasises the form’s power for twentieth-century poets. It allows no easy narrative resolution, it turns around and around, building an acoustic chamber for the words, the lines, the meanings…Each time the art of losing is heard, repeated, addressed, it takes on a new layer, a different force. The words of loss become louder, different, more ominous and yet at the same time more human.2
Colm Toibin has reflected on Bishop’s ability to grant permission to us in processing our griefs and exiles,
I was interested in her tone, by the suggestions of loss, by her way of making what was unfamiliar seem even stranger.3
His engagement with the poet’s tone, with the evocative sense of loss she was able to embody and articulate, liberated him to reflect and write about the pain of his own life, and his seasons of separation from Ireland and from joy.
This turns the spotlight on us as readers. What do we bring into the ‘acoustic chamber’ of this villenelle? What losses and griefs might we attempt to shrug off? How do we process the refusal of trauma to be ignored or minimised?
‘One Art’ meets us, not with smugness, nor with easy resolution, but with genuine emotion suspended across the intractable movement of our lives. It allows us room to not immediately open up, to cloak confessional elements of our lives in denial, but it also insists on allowing a shaft of light into the cloistered pain of our hearts and our lives.
As much as any poem in this ‘Close and Slow’ series, this masterwork by Elizabeth Bishop shows to us the power of poetry, and its ability to infiltrate the battlements of our heart and psyche. CS Lewis insisted that ‘myth’, the telling of a story had the ability to create feeling and experience in a way that the mere dissemination of information cannot achieve. Summing up how a reader feels when swept into the ‘myth’ or the narrative of a poem or story he states,
You were not knowing, but tasting; but what you were tasting turns out to be a universal principle. The moment we state this principle, we are admittedly back in the world of abstraction. It is only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience the principle concretely.4
Poetry weaves precisely this kind of myth, and its literary form acts as the host through which our souls receive meaning in its experiential sense. We could read multiple textbooks on trauma and denial, but ‘One Art’ insists that we feel this before we rationalise it and in so doing opens the poem to our hearts, our hearts to the poem, and our griefs to our own line of vision.
Boland, Eavan and Strand, Mark. The Making of a Poem. New York: Norton, 2000, p.5
Boland and Strand The Making of a Poem, p.20
Tóibín, Colm. On Elizabeth Bishop. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 40.
Lewis, C. S. Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church. London, HarperCollins Publishers, 2000, p.195.