Villanelle

"Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night", "The Waking", and "One Art" are all beautifully and masterfully crafted poems that follow the form of villanelles. But one that stands out is Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art". "The Waking" seems to run in a circular motion, obviously repeating lines previously written as to follow the form of a villanelle. The poem is very deep, too deep for me since I can't seem to make much of it. Roethke is able to achieve this depth by straying from the normal rhymes to slant rhymes, giving him more freedom in selecting what to write. "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" is a little easier to understand than Roethke's puzzle. It is essentially touching on the cliche "seize the day" with the title that is repeated several times throughout. Bishop's "One Art", though, moves forward more than the other two which seemed to circle around the same thoughts. That's not to say that they aren't pieces of amazing literature. She is able to center the whole poem around the phrase "the art of losing isn't hard to master." She writes about the struggle of losing material things, tying it with the loss of a person, or even an emotional loss. It seems to progress more than the others. Like I said, it addresses more than just misplacing physical items, like car keys. The poem's key phrase expands from this to leaving somewhere, or getting something new having to leave the old behind. Then in the last stanza the meaning jumps to losing a person, the most dramatic point in the poem. Bishop points out that all of these losses aren't disasters, they only seem that way.