The art of losing

Among the forms I have tried as an aspiring poet is the villanelle. It has five three-line stanzas followed by a single stanza of four lines, a total of nineteen lines. The first line of the first stanza serves as the last line of the second and fourth stanzas, and the third line of the first stanza as the last line of the third and fifth stanzas. The first and third lines of the first stanza recur as the third and fourth lines of the last stanza. Only two rhymes are used.

The villanelle began as a song of the Italian peasants while they went about their farm tasks. Later, it emerged in France by way of a disguised love poem about a lost turtle dove, already with its recurring lines, in the round form that it now has.

Many poets writing in English have tried their hand at the villanelle, and often their effort yielded nothing more than light verse, because, being circular, the villanelle cannot move forward and tell a story. But Dylan Thomas pulled it off, with his iconic “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” The other perhaps equally successful villanelle is Elizabeth Bishop’s immensely popular “One Art.”

“One Art” is a poem about loss. Elizabeth lost her father when she was just eight months old.  When she was five, her mother had a breakdown, and eventually died when Elizabeth was 18.  The mother’s illness and death have a bearing on the poem.

The first stanza establishes the poet’s attitude — resignation, surrender — to the fact of loss.

“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.”

Then, as though to perfect the art of losing, the poet matter-of-factly advises — “Lose something every day” — and   goes on to list the items to let go, or accept the inevitable disappearance of, moving up the scale from minor to major, with increasing speed — door keys, time, places, names, destinations, a mother’s watch, a beloved house, beautiful cities, rivers, a continent, and, finally, the friend or lover to whom the poem is addressed.

The villanelle ends with the first and third lines of the first stanza:

“the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”

In fact, the poem’s ironic tone only makes the art of losing less of an art, difficult to master, that may be mastered only on the surface, and is therefore to all intents and purposes a pseudo art.

“Loss” is a theme that recurs in the Gospels.  For instance, Luke writes about how Jesus, in reply to the Pharisees and the scribes, who deplored his consorting with sinners, told a parable about a man who had a hundred sheep, and, losing one of them, left the ninety-nine to search for it, and about a woman who lost one of her ten silver coins, and to find it, lighted a lamp and thoroughly swept the house. In both cases, there was a celebration upon the recovery of the thing lost, over which, Jesus added, the joy could not compare with the jubilation in heaven over one sinner who repents.

About repentance, to drive his point home, Jesus proceeded to tell the story of a young man who asked his father for his share of the inheritance and squandered it in loose living in a far country, and, in reduced circumstances, found himself during a famine eating the food of the swine he was employed to look after. Coming back to his senses, he decided to head for home and ask forgiveness from his father, who readily forgave him and even threw a party to celebrate his return.

One finds that, in the Gospels, loss is never just loss, but is always paired with redemption. Loss and redemption recur like the refrain in a villanelle. Losing might look like, but in fact is really not, and will not for long remain a disaster — not with God, a caring and an ever-merciful Father, not with Jesus having definitively defeated sin and death through his rising.