Summary
The second stanza actually begins with a command: the speaker says “Lose something every day.” This command (which could also simply be a fragment of a descriptive sentence) only takes up part of the first line, which then contains the beginning of another command. In this second command, the speaker tells listeners to accept and move past the annoyance of losing something. They actually list a few examples of the kinds of things one might lose: a key and, in the more abstract sense, an hour. The stanza closes with the speaker repeating the poem’s first line, but this time, the meaning of the line “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” is somewhat clearer, thanks to all of the speaker’s explanation.
Analysis
If our speaker seemed confident in the poem’s very first line, they seem even more confident, even a little brash, now. The commands that fill up the first two-thirds of this stanza give the impression that the speaker feels very strongly about this topic, so much so that they’re urging their listener to start practicing the art form of losing. Losing takes practice, they imply, and it’s imperative that we all get used to it as soon as possible. Even the rhythm of the first command, “lose something every day,” makes us feel like we’re being scolded or at least instructed very firmly. It’s a short, abrupt sentence, and it means that we encounter a jarring period right in the middle of the poem’s first line. Also, in contrast to the iambic pentameter in the rest of the poem, this line actually begins with a stressed syllable—yet another moment of abrupt impact. All in all, this lets us know that the speaker has no tolerance for people who haven’t mastered the art of losing.
In the second line of this stanza, readers are given a slightly firmer idea of what kind of losses are being discussed here. The two objects at hand, a key and a wasted hour, are very different: one is a physical object and one is an abstraction. However, they’re both quite small, and they are indeed the kinds of things that people lose all the time without getting flustered. As a result, the speaker’s insistence that losing is easy to master rings true. Treating a lost key as a disaster does, indeed, sound immature and silly.
By the close of the second stanza, we can see that the poem doesn’t simply have a rhythm within each line: a repetitive structure undergirds the entire poem. “One Art” is a villanelle. Villanelles are a form of poetry consisting of five tercets (three-line stanzas) and one quatrain (four-line stanza). In a villanelle, the first stanza provides a kind of road map for what we’ll see throughout the poem. The poem’s first and third lines are repeated throughout as alternating refrains, so that each subsequent stanza’s final line is an echo of either that very first line or that third one. This is why the final line of stanza #2, in “One Art,” is a word-for-word repetition of the poem’s first line. Once we know that this poem is a villanelle, we can predict that the line “to be lost that their loss is no disaster,” the final line of the first stanza, will also be repeated in some form as a final line in subsequent stanzas. In the final stanza—which, you may recall, has four lines rather than three—both refrains are repeated, closing out the poem.
Villanelles also have a distinct rhyme scheme. We can already see that the poem’s first, third, fourth, and sixth lines all end in “-er.” We can refer to those as rhyme group A. Meanwhile, lines two and five end with the sound “-ent.” We can refer to those as rhyme group B. As is typical of a villanelle, then, every tercet follows an ABA rhyme scheme.
