English I Honors looked at Elizabeth Bishop’s masterpiece “One Art.”

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 loved 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!) like disaster.

To tease out the meaning of the poem, students looked at three things:

1. The pattern formed by the lost items.
2. Who the “you” is in the final stanza.
3. To whom she’s speaking when she says “Write it” and what the “it” is.

We’ll be revisiting it tomorrow to do some inductive reasoning about it.

English 8 students had a test of sorts: they finally worked to apply and identify the effective readers’ skills on their own, choosing their own passages as well.

Homework

• English 8 Studies: none.
• English I Honors: work on IXL questions for skills B.4, C.2, and C.3.