Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art": Early drafts

 This post continues from the concept and the first draft.

the art of losing isn’t hard to master:
so many things seem almost to be meant
to be lost, that their loss is no disaster. 

Begin with car keys
I’ll never
the art of losing isn’t hrd to master

The practice brings losses, lose them faster,
you’ll find your time well spent
the mastered art of loss is no disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop has moved toward the villanelle form (see Poets.org for description and examples). Perhaps the earlier repetition put the form in mind. Or the rhyme of "master" and "disaster" is too perfect to pass up--"master" suggesting in control, "disaster" suggesting out of control. 

She sets up the lines with these rhymes and roughly sketches in other lines--or perhaps only adds notes of what she should do: "Begin with car keys"--returning to the idea of starting small and building large. The rhymes turn out to have variations that can endure a nineteen-line poem. 

She likes the three ideas in lines seven and eight, but she will separate them to lines four, five and seven, especially since the verb "lose" doesn't match the noun "practice." 

the art of losing isn’t hard to master
so many things really seem to be meant
to be lost, and the loss is no disaster —

She plays with the idea that these objects mean or intend, anthropomorphically, to be lost, so it's okay to accept their loss. She alters this with different qualifications "almost seem" to "really seem," but the first lines are close to their final form. The rhyme, though, of the second line is moved around, probably to avoid repetition of "meant" is needed most, and another "-ent" rhymed word could be move into its place.

Note the change of "well spent" reverses to "badly spent," flipping her original intent due to the poem's strange logic that she establishes in the second line: Looking for something becomes time badly spent since looking for something that intends to be lost is wasted time.