Sample Poetry

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 your 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 loved housed went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lose 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 is not too hard to master
though it may look like disaster.

Analysis

 by Amanda Dombrowski

            “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop emphasizes that getting through life requires you to experience the lose of something.  Losing things is something that happens everyday and this is what the poet is expressing.  Not everyone is completely organized, and she lets us know by using examples of what people loose daily.  “It’s evident/ the art of loosing is not too hard to master/ though it may look like a disaster.”  In this quote Bishop represents that losing is a form of art and everyone masters it sometime in his or her life even if it looks hard to do.  Bishop is saying that you can lose something realistic like a city or river, or an object used everyday like your mothers watch, but these things don’t bring disaster they only just might look like a disaster. 

Electrical Storm

by Elizabeth Bishop

Dawn an unsympathetic yellow.
Cra-aack!- dry light.
The house was really struck.
Crack! A tinny sound, like a dropped tumbler.
silent, his eyes bleached white, his fur on end.
Personal and spiteful as neighbor's child,
thunder began to bang and bump the roof.
One pink flash;
then hail, the biggest size of artificial pearls.
Dead-white, wax-white, cold--
diplomats' wives' favors
from an old moon party--
they lay in melting windrows
on the red ground until well after sunrise.
We got up to find the wiring fused,
no lights, a smell of saltpetre,
and the telephone dead.

The cat stayed in the warm sheets.
The Lent trees had shed all their petals:
wet, stuck, purple, among the dead-eye pearls.

Analysis

by Amanda Dombrowski

"Electrical Storm" by Elizabeth Bishop shows the reaction of a cat while in a big storm.  Trees come crashing down on the house and hail comes falling down from the sky and by all of this happening the cat becomes terrified.  "Silent, his eyes bleached white, his fur on end."  This line from the poem explains the fear of the cat and how the storm made him react.  At the end of the poem everyone else goes outside to see what damage had happened but the cat stayed in the warm sheets still having fear of the storm.