THE ART OF LOSING

With the state of Florida just having set a new national record with 15,300 new coronavirus cases, the sense of a deepening crisis looms—or at least it should. Top health officials are making anxiety-provoking statements that, in Florida and other hot spots, the plague may soon be “out of control.” During these times of crisis, the nation seems to remember that a poem can provide a sense of widespread emotional strength and selects a single “iconic” (hate that word) poem. After the 9/11 attacks, folks who hadn’t read a poem in eons were genuflecting before Auden’s “September 1, 1939”, with its famous line “We must love one another or die.” (Auden, the worst self-editor among great poets, eliminated the line in an edition of his poems published six years after the year the title mentions.) Although we haven’t yet come up with the major poem of the pandemic yet, I nominate Elizabeth Bishop’s already famous “One Art.” As the losses mount, the sad irony of this villanelle’s memorable repeating line, “The art of losing isn't hard to master” may become anthemic.

Read in the light of our current situation, the poem moves from personal losses—”lost door keys, the hour badly spent,” “a mother’s watch”—to much more all-encompassing ones: “I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,/some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.” This progression seems a reversal of how we’ve experienced the pandemic. First, we heard news reports of a global pandemic, out of the reach of most of us; then the ship of death arrives at our shores; then, as the cases mount, the crisis zooms in closer and closer to each one of us.

Finally, the biggest loss arrives—the loss of the beloved. “Even losing you” may be easy to master, Bishop writes, implying that the opposite is true.