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One Art


            
             In "One Art", the author shows attitude in her choice of diction, tone, and verse. In the first five tercets, there is a shift from an attitude of nonchalance to that of emotional hesitation. In the first three tercets, the speaker preaches to lose small items to get accustomed to losing things. In the fourth and fifth tercets, the speaker starts losing bigger items with more sentimental value. In the last quatrain, the speaker looks as if she is losing something important like a loved one but tries to console herself by looking objectively at her loss as though it were a parallel loss to that of her other items. The speaker is more emotional in the final quatrain and seems to be hesitant in repeating her flippant attitude to the other things she has lost when she writes losing you. The speaker is clearly more emotional when losing something closer to her in lines 16-19 then she is when unemotionally losing things of lesser value in lines 1-15.
             In lines 1-15, the author's main goal is to make the reader feel as if loss is not important. Although the author believes this way, she still reveals some emotion when losing things in the fourth and fifth tercets. In the first three lines, the speaker seems like she is preaching that "loss is not a disaster" and "things seemed filled with the intent to be lost". The speaker seems very confident in the first three tercets by repeating "The art of losing isn't hard to master" and telling one to "lose something every day." She also tells "losing farther, losing faster: places, and names", these things are said because the speaker wants one to prepare losing more and more. Lines 10 to 13 show a crack in the speaker's confidence. She begins to use more emotion with her "mother's watch and "loved houses". The things she loses in lines 10-16, are more personal and more sentimentally valuable than what she loses in lines 1-9. In lines 13-16 the author loses huge things such as "two cities, lovely ones" and "two rivers, a continent" and mentions she misses these things.


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