In “One Art,” the speaker repeats the line “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” This line can be read as an aphorism, since it seeks to express a general truth about the world or about human experience. Through the poem, the speaker goes on to “prove” this aphorism by describing losses she has experienced and insisting, again and again, that they haven’t been a “disaster.”
The poem’s use of this aphorism has several effects. First, since the line sounds like a general, indisputable truth, the speaker’s repetition of it imbues the poem with authority. The speaker sounds confident and sure of herself, and the reader might—at least at first—take the aphorism at face value, assuming that it is true and logical since it sounds true and logical.
At the same time, aphorisms often oversimplify human realities. They are pithy and concise by nature, but this also means that they often leave out a lot in what they express.
In this case, the line “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” certainly seems to oversimplify the experiences of loss. And, as the poem progresses, the line sounds reductive to the point of being unbelievable, since the losses the speaker evokes grow bigger and bigger. By the end of the poem, in fact, it appears that the reverse of the line is true, as it seems unlikely that the speaker can truly “master” the loss of this beloved “you.” The speaker emphasizes this in the poem’s penultimate line, when she changes the aphorism to “the art of losing’s not too hard to master."
Ultimately, the aphorism works as key part of the poem’s irony. As the speaker repeats this phrase again and again, it sounds less like an actual general truth, and more like a claim the speaker is asserting and repeating herself to try to convince herself of its truth. This creates a powerful tension in the poem between what the speaker claims about loss—that it is not such a big deal—and what the poem shows about loss, which is how truly devastating and painful it can be for the person experiencing it.