Bishop's in My Brain, or Brief Thought on Loss

I've always loved the Elizabeth Bishop villanelle "One Art"--but something new struck me about this poem today. And yes, I'm nerdy. And yes, I was thinking about this poem semi-randomly. And yes, I don't need to read it because I know it by heart.

That's because it's a most excellent poem.

Anyway, my thought revolved around the idea that certain things have an intent to be lost, because I'd never particularly thought about that until today. And really, that's an interesting intent to assign to certain types of inanimate objects. (I must admit: I quite like the idea of keys intending to get lost...)

But then, the whole point of the poem isn't actually that the art of losing isn't hard to master, it's the exact reverse: that the art of losing is hard to master. When I think back to the early idea of intent in the poem, I begin to think that Bishop may well have been onto something: our ability to master loss depends on our willingness to accept responsibility for the loss. Our ability to fess up and say: yes, that was my fault, I'm the one who let that go.

It seems to me that if we are able to do that, if we are able to acknowledge that we did the losing, that just may be the first step in regaining some of the things we've lost. Perhaps.