Where Lord Byron's "She walks in Beauty" gives much praise to the speaker's love interest, Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" comments on the speaker has lost their love interest and the ways they deal with the situation. Lord Byron uses similes and metaphors for comparisons such as "She walks in Beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry nights;" in order to convey the strong feelings that the speaker has about the woman and her beauty. In order to convey a matter-of-fact attitude in her poem Bishop uses parallelism for comparison to casually share the things the speaker has lost, including door keys, her mother's watch, houses, cities, and love.
Both poems contains shifts in how they describe their situations, but they aren't very significant plot changing ones. In Lord Byron's poem, the imagery of the speaker's love interest changes from beautiful, yet dark comparisons like "night" and "starry skies" to more lighter ones, like "peace" and "innocent". Elizabeth Bishop's poem contains a slight shift of feelings, where at the very end she writes "It's evident / the art of losing's not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster." While she makes it sound like she treats losing love as losing anything significantly important, I believe that by saying "Write it" in parenthesis creates a slight hesitation to show her true feelings slightly.
Personally, Lord Byron's view is closer to my own. While I don't get as mushy as he does about a significant other, I do care about love more than Bishop seems to show in her poem.
But isn't Bishop admitting how devastating the loss of love is, even though we pretend to be brave?
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