Reflection on Detachment Or Rhapsody on Plum Blossoms in Standard Running Script

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

As false dawn.

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

Now they are rising together in calm swells

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessed day,

And cries,"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,

The soul descends once more in bitter love

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

Of dark habits, keeping their difficult balance.''

John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

So Bishop's poem (and it comes first, for women must be attended to on the question of detachment as they best show us the nature of attachment) shows us the connection between attachment and detachment in a way that is similar to Eliot's point that attachment and detachment are both alike in important ways, while indifference is different and problematic. Detachment is passionate and oriented to reattachment to something.

Wilbur's poem is beautiful and profound. Love prevents us from an all-too-easy and improper "detachment"--an escape of the soul from the difficult messiness and beauty of life. The very nature of our attachment to the world because of love implies, too, a detachment--for it is a "bitter love" and a "difficult balance" and a reluctant descent.

Keats is the solution that I'm least comfortable with--a) his fear is related to him not having time to write (and while this is a sort of living, it is also a reflection on living, which ought to be less difficult to imagine giving up than life itself); b) it is through isolated thought (both of which are problematic, and being alone is, I think, impossible) that he detaches from his fear of death.