Loss

Strand & Boland bring up an interesting idea in their exposition of the villanelle which they do not take time to elaborate on: "And while the subject of most lyric poems is loss, the formal properties of the villanelle address the idea of loss directly." Perhaps having read the rest of their book I would have better context for this statement, I think of it as a boon that the idea is left so underdeveloped. That is, I feel that using this as a basis for my analysis is more legitimate when the reasoning is not handed to me, when I have to search for and evaluate that reasoning on my own terms.

"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop was the poem that, of these three, did the best job in helping me to analyze this theme of loss in the villanelle. Go figure, since its a poem explicitly about loss. But it was not the explicit message of the poem that helped me to understand the villanelle as a form built on loss - rather, it was the unique stylistic choices which Bishop made to bring that theme to life subtextually.

Ironically, Bishop's poem captures the essence of the villanelle by breaking its own rules. Perhaps this is the key to understanding all art forms - to twist and innovate them as many ways as possible while still maintaining that mysterious essence of the form, so that when you are done the single connecting strand of each work in the genre reveals itself as the core.

Bishop's innovation is to eschew exact repetition of one of the refrain lines - "to be lost that their loss wasn't a disaster" - in favor of only using a single portion of it - "disaster" - as the refrain. This single word allows us to localize the function of the villanelle more precisely than the traditional phrase, for a word encapsulates the basic meaning of loss in a villanelle - the cyclical loss of meaning.

Each repeated refrain takes up, and subsequently sheds, an aspect of reality. In doing so the concept becomes, in each moment, real, but just as quickly is flung into a new context. We are thus challenged to determine what this phrase means - what is the essence of an idea when it is robbed of the contexts which invented it. Obviously, this is a hypothetical question. We cannot place a word or a phrase or an idea in a sterilized lab room and dissect it for its true meaning. The villanelle thus offers the next best method - to examine the constraints in which the concept can be created and exist, and then to analyze their connections.

In the context of Bishop's poem, we are presented with numerous cases of "loss" - losing a door key, losing knowledge, losing precious objects, memories, losing people, losing places. "Loss" as a concept is reproduced new in each place, but the placement of refrains informs us that there is a connection between each of these. What then, can be said to be the commonality between the frustration of a lost key and the mixed feelings of abandonment, confusion, sadness, joy that occur when we lose a person in our life?