Demonstrategy. H. L. Hix
lifted up, I look at the child looking at the coffin, and so on. Duck and rabbit both are present in one figure, and similarly the child’s point of view and the adult’s point of view both are present in this poem.
Like the other forms of ambiguity, perspectival ambiguity matters: it is a condition for morality. If I cannot imagine myself in the way Bishop imagines herself in this poem, as both an interested agent and an impartial spectator, then I cannot assess the moral worth of a decision or action. Neither perspective by itself is enough. If I can see myself only as an agent, I can act only out of greed. If I can see myself only as a spectator, I cannot act at all. Only the dynamic tension of both perspectives together, the relationship between my agent and spectator selves, enables me to think and act morally.
The particular perspectival ambiguity in this poem, the simultaneous presence of a child’s point of view and an adult’s, may resonate especially strongly for readers steeped from childhood, as Bishop herself was, in the language of Christianity. It might call to mind, for instance, these words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Or, again, these words of Paul: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Whatever credence one does or does not accord those texts from that particular religious tradition, and whatever interpretation one puts upon them, they at least involve some form of interaction, some dynamic tension, between the perspective of a child and the perspective of an adult, and they advise some form of attention to both perspectives.
In “One Art,” the speaker declares that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” a proposition she expands on by enumerating things one might lose (door keys, places, names, intentions…), and by then enumerating things she herself has lost. The list of losses, possible and actual, culminates in “you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love).” “One Art” compactly and perfectly illustrates all the forms of ambiguity identified so far. Lexical ambiguity is at work in the word “master,” which can mean “get good at” or “overcome.” This gives two very different readings to the first line and its variants. “The art of losing isn’t hard to get good at” establishes one aim, but “the art of losing isn’t hard to overcome” establishes an opposite aim. In the former reading, I am trying to do more and better losing; in the latter, I am trying to stop losing. Syntactical ambiguity occurs in the penultimate line, itself one of those variants of the first line. The line might be read to mean, “the art of losing is not so difficult that it cannot be overcome,” or “it is not difficult to get good at the art of losing.” In the one case, what is not too hard is the art of losing, and in the other what is not too hard is the mastering of it. Temporal ambiguity, too, is present in the last stanza. Has the losing of you already occurred, or is it inevitably going to occur? I lost my mother’s watch, and I lost two cities, so the first reading of “Even losing you” would be that it has happened already, in the past. But then the next verb tense is in the future: “I shan’t have lied…” That makes “Even losing you” read as “Even when I have lost you” (i.e. even in the future when I lose you), I will not have lied. As in the last line of “The Fish,” this temporal ambiguity establishes a relationship between a self I was and a self I am or might be. Finally, there is perspectival ambiguity in the use of the second person: in the third stanza, the “you” in “where it was you meant / to travel” seems to be the reader. But in the last stanza, the “you” in “Even losing you” is the beloved. So, as in “First Death in Nova Scotia,” I the reader am given both points of view, that of the beloved and that of the neutral bystander.
To those forms of ambiguity, “One Art” adds tonal ambiguity, which arises from its use of a form of understatement I’ll call “parastatement,” familiar from its presence, for instance, in such canonical works as Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, with its declaration that “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.” This string of insults lists ways in which the beloved fails to live up to the standards of feminine beauty prevalent then and there: her eyes are dim; her lips are not red; her breasts are not white; her hair is like wires; her cheeks are not rosy; and she has bad breath. But we know that this is a form of praise whether or not we ourselves embrace those standards of beauty, and even before the “And yet” that signals the speaker’s making the praise explicit by declaring, “I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.”
Shakespeare’s poem inverts the familiar rhetorical device we call “faint praise.” If I ask a friend what she thinks of my latest book and she says, “The cover is beautifully designed,” she will have communicated clearly something she didn’t say. The same parastatement at work in “high culture” also functions in popular culture, as in Lucinda Williams’ country song “Jackson”: “All the way to Jackson / I don’t think I’ll miss you much”; “Once I get to Baton Rouge / I won’t cry a tear for you”; and so on. We know the speaker means something other than what she says. She is going to miss her ex all the way to Jackson; she is going to cry when she gets to Baton Rouge. In “One Art,” too, we know that the losses the speaker repeatedly insists are not disasters really are disasters, especially the “losing you” that the speaker introduces, with true parastatement, as “even losing you.”
Parastatement is understatement in the form of protesting too much. I call it tonal ambiguity because each aspect carries with it a tone: the Shakespeare sonnet has a tone of dismissal and one of admiration; the Lucinda Williams song has a tone of resolve and one of despair; and “One Art” has a tone of flippant unconcern and one of inconsolable grief. Parastatement plays on a first-order/second-order distinction, of the sort Lynne McFall makes in distinguishing second-order from first-order volitions. A second-order volition, she says, “is a complex desire: a second-order desire to have a certain first-order desire be one’s will: to be the desire that moves one to action.” McFall illustrates the distinction with smoking: “I want to want not to smoke, and I want this desire, rather than the desire to smoke, to be the one that is effective.” The dissonance between the first- and second-order desires enables me to make one desire present by stating the other. Stating the second-order desire (“I wish I didn’t want a cigarette right now”) expresses forcefully, without actually stating it, the first-order desire: I want a cigarette right now. That same dissonance is at work in “One Art.” The second-order desire, I wish I wouldn’t get upset over losing things I love, is the one that gets stated, but the first-order desire, I wish I hadn’t lost so many things I love, is more forcefully expressed because it is not stated.
Parastatement proves particularly useful for circumventing censorship. It is a way of saying the unsayable. Bishop, with her privileged economic background and powerful connections, may seem an unlikely victim of censorship, but her personal life bears on this poem. The “I” and the “you” in the poem are very open, and we as readers may fill in the poem’s “you” with whom we will. “One Art” reads beautifully and effectively if I know nothing about Elizabeth Bishop, and read myself as the “I” and my long-lost one true love as the “you,” regardless of my gender or that of my beloved. But in Bishop’s time the social pressure directed against homosexuality was so active and pervasive that her loves could not be named in her poems, nor her love affairs described explicitly. At least two of those loves, though, seem clearly to be among the losses lamented in “One Art.” Bishop lived in Brazil for more than a decade with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares; in 1967 Soares committed suicide by overdosing on tranquilizers. They lived in Petrópolis, at the convergence of the Quitandinha and Piabanha rivers. Even if Lota cannot be named in the poem, “two rivers” and “a continent” make her present in it. And the “you” addressed in the last stanza is apparently Alice Methfessel, a much younger woman whom Bishop met when she returned to Boston after her years in Brazil. “One Art” was written during a period when Methfessel was engaged, apparently soon to be lost to Bishop. Societally-imposed sanction forbade Bishop direct expression