The Categorical Descent of Loss in Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art
Diagramming the Ontology of Grief in Verse
Author
Affiliation
Dr Charles T. Gray, Datapunk
Good Enough Data & Systems Lab
Published
April 16, 2025
Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art is a katabasis (a hero’s descent into the underworld) tracing loss.
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 the final stanza, she takes an Orphean turn to write that some loss is categorically different, no matter how much we may wish it were not.
Bishop descends through grief by way of categories of loss. The transitions between stanzas trace functors–structure-preserving maps that model how we experience loss similarly, until we don’t: an Orphean turn that writes grief.
Categories of loss
Formalising categories of loss reveals the exquisite ontology of grief Bishop unfolds, in which:
Objects comprise the protagonist and things they have lost;
Morphisms relate how the protagonist has lost comparable things;
Functors relate entire categories of loss, preserving structure–until they don’t.
From everyday loss to experiential loss
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.
Bishop first traces how the things we say we ‘lose’, such as keys and hours, is similar to the way we forget places we’ve been and names of people we’ve met.
These losses are no disaster.
From experiential loss to metonymic loss
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.
Losing her mother’s watch is a shame–but in the grand scheme of things, it is not categorically worse than losing memories once treasured: places and names forgotten.
To lose that which represents–a metonym–is still no disaster.
From metonymic loss to geographic loss
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.
No matter the size of metonym–a watch, a river, a continent–the loss is no disaster.
To the loss almost too hard to write
—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.
Bishop has almost convinced us that loss is not too hard to master–as one can tolerate losing a continent.
But she turns, like Orpheus, in her katabasis of grief to write that here the diagram fails to commute; for losing a beloved feels like disaster.
