the exact locations she is speaking of here. They are across the globe and in periods of her life of traveling, but emphasize the period when she lived in Brazil with her longtime love Lota de Macedo Soares, an heiress of a great estate, a "realm" in Brazil. "She had lost the three houses of 'One Art' in Key West, Petrópolis, and Ouro Prêto, she told David McCullough." The final quatrain is the final mention of the subject of Bishop's present loss, and reveals that the purpose of writing the poem is personal healing and growth. Mentioned in the Writing section of this article, Bishop kept a balance between distancing herself from a poem written about her life, and the "joke voice" mentioned here is the sole physical trait of reference to Bishop's lost partner. The parentheses and slight description give an insight into what Bishop is thinking about while writing the poem. This is a crucial element of the stanza because of the next parenthetical pause which again expresses that "the art of losing's not too hard to master" (a moment when the refrain deviates from "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), Bishop interrupts the line to remind herself to "(Write it!)" and remind herself of the message which she is preaching. Form The poem is a villanelle, an originally French poetic form known for generally dealing with pastoral themes. Bishop is a known formalist in her poems, following the rules of a structure closely; though the final stanza ironically breaks from the format, and our expectations, using parenthesis, italics, an em-dash, and a deviation in the wording of the refrain. Brad Leithauser wrote of the poem that, in addition to "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas, that it "...might have taken the elaborate stanzaic arrangement even if the Italians hadn't invented it three hundred years ago." The ABA rhyme scheme "One Art" alternates between the "-er" and "-ent" ending sound, with the last stanza repeating the A sound, as is with the villanelle. The refrains, "The art of losing isn't hard to master", which varies in the eighteenth line, "the art of losing's not too hard to master". The villanelle has no set meter, but Bishop keeps a pattern of alternating eleven and ten-syllable lines, with predominantly iambic pentamer. In an interview with Elizabeth Spires in 1978, Bishop said that her