A Light at the End of the Poetry Tunnel

There are only three more weeks left in the semester...that's two weeks of class and then finals. To be honest, I'm ready for the semester to be over. I've never really liked the last few weeks of any semester because it feels like they turn into this slow trudge towards the finish.

I've really been feeling this way about my poetry class. I mean, I liked the class a lot for a while, but once we got into the whole suicidal/homicidal/beastiality/adultery/creepy stuff, the class got kind of old. Yesterday I recieved a breath of fresh air in that class though...it was a light at the end of my poetry tunnel.

I've been thinking a lot about loss lately. Not for any real reason, but just because I'm the type of person that likes to hold onto things, so when I lose something or go through any sort of big change, I tend to internalize it and dwell on it. So because the past year or so has been one that held a lot of change for me (particularly internal change), I've just been looking back and thinking about things and pretty much living in a nostalgic funk for the past month and a half.


So this villanelle really resonated with me:


One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop


The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.


And then I remembered why I like poetry: I can always manage to find myself in a poem, especially when I'm not expecting to.