Comparison of 2 Poems By One Author (Elizabeth Bishop)

For our assignment we were told to pick a literary work or piece that we have worked with this year and find another piece by the same author and compare both of the pieces. I chose Elizabeth Bishop we studied her poem "One Art" and I am comparing it to her other poem "The Mountain". I will start by analyzing each poem:

One Art

By Elizabeth Bishop

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 disaster.

     In class we first discussed the topic of the style/form this poem was written in. It's a villanelle! A 19 line poem with two refrains and rhyming sequences. In this case the first sentence is one of those refrains, "The art of losing isn’t hard to master;" but it changes slightly the last time it is said, "the art of losing’s not too hard to master." Comparing those two lines in the beginning it's like she's saying losing isn't hard it's east to get over and easy to deal with, but come to the end she is saying it's not too hard but it still is slightly hard and getting harder to deal with. My idea was that she has Alzheimer's disease because of how forgetful she is in this piece. I don't think it's that she is losing these things as in misplacing them I think it's more that she is losing the memories. At first she seemed to just be misplacing stuff like "accept the fluster of lost door keys." But the line "lose something everyday is very deep as if she's losing a piece of her each day. When it says, "places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel" it means all the people and places you've been or dreamt to go to is gone.  The "three loved houses" is a memory of those houses where she had lovers or grew up in are all gone. I think "even losing you" is the deepest line of the poem. This could mean she pushed away someone because of her disease or they died. I looked up some information on Elizabeth and her father had died when she was just a year old. Her mother suffered through serious bouts of mental instability and was permanently committed to an institution when Elizabeth was only five years old. I found this information from this link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/Elizabeth-bishop. But besides that I feel that the losing you could be either losing her father or her mother, but I definitely believe this piece is based on her mothers psychological wellness. 

Then the other poem I will analyze:

For some reason the text will only show up as a picture, so I will just leave it at that I apologize for the smaller print for this poem. This poem is 22 lines long, I did some research and couldn't find a specific name for a 22 lined piece of poetry, so please comment if you know! This piece has a repetition that alternates between each stanza on the last line of "I do not know my age" and the other line is "Tell me how old I am" This poem seems to be sort of full of questions and the speaker doesn't know what's going on, is probably alone or often ignored with her questions.

Now I will compare these pieces:

It is quite obvious to me that these both relate to her mother or at least the idea of forgetfulness or Alzheimer's as a whole. I feel her mother had a lot to do her role in poetry and she bases her as the speaker in these pieces. "I don't know my age" "Tell me how old I am" and "nobody tells me anything" is obvious that there is no individuality in this persons personality. They have no independence of their own and rely on others. These pieces both have refrained sentences and I think that is special to her as a poet, she probably favored the repetition side of things. I like her as a poet, I never really see pieces about forgetfulness usually just depression, death, or love, so I like this switched view of poetry!