Unrequited Love- One Art and Because I Liked You Better

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Unrequited Love Analytical Essay In the poems, “One Art” by, Elizabeth Bishop and “Because I Liked You,” by A.E. Housman, both poets experience a painful dose of unrequited love. In both poems the poets attempt to cover up their feelings but as the poem lengthens, the poets shift from denying their true feelings to revealing them. Housman and Bishop demonstrate this by using shifting tones and diction throughout both poems. In both poems, the tone shifts as it progresses. Housman starts off in a very curt tone and choppy diction but in the second half of the poem, he changes to more lyrical tone and even illustration filled diction. Examples of this shift are “we parted, stiff and dry;” and “where clover whitens.” Bishop begins her poem with a very broad tone about losing but later shifts to a more specific and personal tone as she talks about her relationship. She tries to mask her despair towards losing with a repetitive villanelle structure using the phrases “no disaster” and “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” repeatedly throughout the poem. In the second half of the poem Bishop moves from losing tangible objects, “lost door keys,” to intangible ones such as “two cities.” This shift represents her acceptance of her true feelings and change of tone. While the structure and the language used in both poems have many differences, both poems share an end result of the poet’s feeling of love towards another. Bishop begins her poem with “then practice losing…places and names” but later changes to a more personal “even losing you” once her true feelings towards loss come out and she realizes that “losing’s…may look like (write it!) a disaster.” In Housman’s poem her starts off with lines like “to throw the thought away,” before shifting to “was one that kept his word,” to show that he kept both the promise to his partner but also the one to himself.

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