The Art of Loving

The poem below is a villanelle I wrote based on Elizabeth Bishop’s sublime work “One Art.”

It is dedicated to my wife Anne to mark 45 years of our living together, beginning April 30, 1979. We are those strange characters in the picture included here.

The Art of Loving

The art of loving is not so hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be loved that we should but love them so much faster.

Love something every day. Accept the lustre
of kind and friendly people, the chats so quickly spent.

The art of loving is not so hard to master.

Then practice loving deeper, loving faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. Loving these won’t bring disaster.

I’ve loved my long-lost family. And look! The last, or
next-to-last, of my dear cousins, has yet to relent.
The art of loving is not so hard to master.

I’ve loved four cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I’ve roamed, two rivers, a continent.
Now gone, I miss them, but leaving them was no disaster.

—But loving you (the gentle voice, the gestures
I adore) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of loving is not too hard to master
though its ultimate loss through death is (Write it!) a disaster.

Villanelle

A French verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas. These two refrain lines form the final couplet in the quatrain. See “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The House on the Hill.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/villanelle

https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/