A little while ago, I had a quick exchange on Facebook with a friend who said, in the tone of admitting something gauche, that she didn’t like Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”. I responded, sort of flippantly, that it’s the best breakup poem ever. Then I thought a little bit more about my own feelings about the poem—it’s not one I like unambiguously or even particularly passionately, but it is one that somehow recurs to me in a specific set of emotional circumstances.

“One Art” isn’t a great lyrical poem. It’s no great shakes read out loud. The rhythm gets jerky, particularly in the middle lines of the stanzas and over the linebreak to the last lines. The line “so many things seem filled with the intent” is fine, but following it with eight (eight!) heavy monosyllables really takes the momentum out of the whole thing: “so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is no disaster” is really underwhelming—that line seems like it really should start with an unstressed syllable, and it gets irretrievably bogged down when you have to carefully articulate the consonants that divide “lost” and “that” and “their.” The middle-to-end of the third stanza (”places, and names, and where it was you meant/to travel”) is similarly mushy.

I also particularly hate “(Write it!),” the interjection in the last line. It’s obvious. It feels a little like being bludgeoned with the bottom line of the poem, like, yes, we get it, this is hard to admit. It serves the crucial function of setting off the final admission (that loss feels, in fact, like disaster), but there should be some more elegant way to get that point across.

The thing is, despite all of these clear-headed objections to the poem, in times of loss, I end up saying to myself in my head, “now practice losing further, losing faster.” (The line is actually “Now practice losing farther, losing faster,” but I don’t seem to be able to correct that in my memory of the poem.) I go back to this poem regularly when I’m really sad, and then the directive tone of the poem seems particularly, compellingly poignant, and the setup of the penultimate stanza, which widens the scope and begins to admit ambivalence, seems skillful and kind of perfect. And when you’re really sad, you forget that “(Write it!)” is obnoxious and just hear it as a little stutter-step before the big blow of “disaster.”

The fact is, the poem endures, and I think it endures largely because it articulates something pretty fundamental about loss. Like Dickenson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” which I actually prefer as a poem, “One Art” is about not the great catastrophic moment of loss but its aftermath, which may ultimately be worse, as the beloved object recedes from the space it (he) used to occupy. Unlike Dickenson, though, Bishop gives us the loser returned to daily life—surrounded by objects and obligations and situated in a personal history. The poem plugs gamely along for its duration, if not chipper then at least normal (it deals with keys, a watch, houses—you can picture it doing its grocery shopping, paying its bills), until, very suddenly, in the final two words, it collapses in a heap. That collapse is then read retroactively into the rest of the poem—all its mundanity becomes a staving-off of the fundamental fact.

To master the art of losing is to cease to feel the pain of loss. And “One Art” seems to me ultimately very conflicted about even that stated goal of mastery: conflicted about the final giving up, the biggest loss, what Dickinson calls “the letting go.” Your keys aren’t really gone until you stop looking for them, you know? The poem skirts disaster—fears feeling the full weight of loss, but also, I think, fears not feeling it. The art of losing can’t be mastered, because once it is, there’s no mastery involved.