Good Bones Poem Analysis

“Good Bones” by Maggie Smith illustrates a mother’s honest perspective of the world. The mother views the world as equally horrible as it is wonderful. Throughout her life, her experiences have taught her that life is fragile. However, she believes that her role as a mother is to “sell the world” to her children. She does this by protecting her children from the ugly parts of the world and emphasizing the beautiful parts of life instead. Smith demonstrates this relationship between a mother and her children through realism that could either be considered refreshingly or brutally honest.

Although the realness of the mother’s voice in “Good Bones” is a quality that I admire, her honesty can easily come across as her simply being pessimistic. From the mother’s point of view, “The world is at least fifty percent terrible.” Instead, she could have easily said, “The world is at least fifty percent wonderful,” allowing for a more optimistic tone. This word choice alone demonstrates that the narrator has a negative view of the world. However, the poem was written

Initially, certain aspects to Smith’s writing were distracting to me, such as the format of the poem. The poem is written with no line breaks, making the piece appear as one big paragraph of writing. Because of this, the poem could be made more visually appealing if the author considered adding line breaks. In addition, doing this can help the author illustrate important points of the piece by adding them after each time she says, “I keep this from my children.” After analyzing the piece, I learned to appreciate the meaning of the poem so much that the format did not bother me as much as it did when I first read it. Despite this, if someone is simply reading the poem for enjoyment, the format may be so distracting that the reader may not be able to appreciate the true meaning of the poem as a