One Art

A villanelle is a 19-line poem containing five tercets (three-line stanzas) and a quatrain (four-line stanza). Villanelles also repeat the first and third lines in the tercets in an alternating manner, and then combine the lines at the end of the quatrain. Repeated lines in this manner are known as refrains.

Villanelles also have a strict rhyme scheme. The tercets use an aba rhyme scheme:  

a.   The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

b.  so many things seem filled with the intent

a.   to be lost that their loss is no disaster. (Lines 1-3)

The quatrain implements an abaa rhyme scheme:

a.   —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

b.  I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

a.   the art of losing’s not too hard to master

a.   though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. (Lines 21-24)

Bishop slightly varies the refrain in the quatrain. By referencing writing in her poem (known as metafiction), Bishop underscores her attempt at accepting loss by struggling with the villanelle form itself. 

Enjambment happens when a poetic line continues onto the next line without an end-stop or punctuation at the end of the line. The final stanza of “One Art” provides an example: