Summary
Our speaker starts this stanza with yet another command, this time raising expectations for how we should go about practicing this art form. They tell the reader that they should work on losing “farther,” and “faster.” Then, after a colon closes out the stanza's first line, the speaker launches into a list of what kinds of losses their listener should try out. If the less-significant losses were “door keys” and an “hour badly spent,” these losses are more abstract and internal: “places, names, and where it was you meant/to travel.” In other words, the speaker is discussing the loss of memories. But these are minor, temporary slips of the mind. They might be more unnerving than lost keys, but they’re still not a huge deal, the speaker reassures. This reassurance takes the form of the stanza’s last line, a modified version of the last line in the first tercet. This line tells listeners that the loss of the things the speaker has listed won’t “bring disaster.”
Analysis
Here, the speaker grows more demanding. They enjoin their listener to “practice losing farther, losing faster,” but it’s not only this direction that tells us things are heating up. It’s also the types of loss that are listed here. They’re still minor losses, of the kind that most people experience on a near-daily basis. Who doesn’t occasionally find it impossible to dig someone’s name out of their memory? But these losses are greater, or at least more stressful, than the lost key of the last stanza, because they happen inside of an individual’s mind. A lost thought or memory, the speaker implies, is a more dramatic experience than the loss of an object, or even the loss of time, because it impacts the loser’s relationship to their own mental and emotional life. Still, the speaker tamps down any concerns by repeating one of the poem’s refrains, which insists that the losses at hand don’t constitute a disaster.
Repetition is the driving force behind the villanelle form as a whole. The two repeated refrains of any villanelle are at the center of the poem. In this particular stanza, though, repetition works on a much smaller scale, creating a feeling of breathless intensity and speed. We first see this in the phrase “losing farther, losing faster.” In addition to the repetition of the word “losing,” we experience alliteration, or the repetition of beginning sounds—here, the sound is “f.” As a matter of fact, this tiny phrase is full of "s" and "f" sounds. These sibilant consonants are slippery and whispery. Here, they contribute to the impression of acceleration—they’re like sonic skates, causing the poem to speed up into a rollicking glide. The list of losses in this stanza also includes a bit of repetition in the form of the word “and.” The previous stanza uses only a comma to separate its list of losses (“lost door keys, the hour badly spent”). But this one uses both commas and the word “and” (“places, and names, and where it was you meant”). This, too, makes the speaker sound breathless and almost out-of-control, as if they’re unable to resist adding additional items onto their list. All in all, the poem’s rhythm picks up in this stanza, and we begin to feel a bit like we’re on an accelerating roller coaster: things are getting either very exciting, very scary, or both.
Finally, it’s worth briefly touching on this stanza's final line. This line echoes the poem’s third line, “to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” But it’s a variation on that line, not an identical twin: here, the speaker says simply, “None of these will bring disaster.” Once again, we see here that Elizabeth Bishop is willing to loosen some of the traditional strictures of the villanelle form. It’s this tendency to take liberties with the form’s traditional demands that allows the poem to maintain its feeling of immediacy and informality.
