Bag of Bones

“Bag of Bones” presents state-sponsored violence as something unnatural and grotesque, which kills innocent people and disrupts the ordinary life cycle in ways both large and small. As a living man, the unnamed victim once enjoyed “listen[ing] to music / that told his own story” (Lines 11-12). The idea that the songs the man enjoyed spoke to him on such a personal level resurrects something of the man’s lost individuality and provides the reader with glimpses into the life the man once had. The reader also gains brief insight into the connection between the unnamed woman and the victim: they appear to have been lovers or spouses, as he once “kissed her / there, quietly” (Lines 16-17). In a jarring and unexpected juxtaposition, the narrator contrasts how “quietly” the man kissed the woman while alive with the “noisy” mass graveyard in which she now contemplates the ghastly appearance of the empty mouth hole in his skull. This gravesite has little in common with places of traditional burial, where people mark their respect for the dead with silence. Instead, the uninterred remains scattered around the area completely upend all human mores: This mass grave site is figuratively “noisy” with the echoes of tragedy and violence.

Similarly, the speaker’s descriptions of the grieving mothers who must receive the remains of their children further emphasizes the unnatural disruptions violence brings into individual people’s lives. Instead of watching her children complete the usual cycles of adulthood and having her children outlive her, the grieving mother has instead outlived her children. She receives “a handful of bones” (Line 27) as her children’s only legacy, the same bones she once formed within her own body through the process of pregnancy and childbirth: “bones / she had given to you / on the occasion of birth” (Lines 27-29). State violence has reversed the natural life cycle, and the poem’s speaker stresses the tragedy of this fact through the imagery of bereaved motherhood.

The source of the mass deaths in “Bag of Bones” is a dictator who has committed violence against his own people. The defining characteristic of the dictator is his senseless cruelty. For him, life has no intrinsic value or meaning. The calculating way in which the dictator views life and death is illustrated by the speaker’s use of impersonal bureaucratic and mathematical imagery when discussing the dictator’s crimes. The dictator “does not give receipts” (Line 31) when he kills people, as if they are all of no account, and his mind “solved by itself a math problem / That multiplied the one death by millions / to equal homeland” (Lines 37-39). For the dictator, the number of deaths is a mere statistic—a “math problem”—that means nothing in the face of his ambitions. His emotional detachment is further stressed in the reference to the “homeland”: The dictator sees his country as an abstraction, as only an embodiment of his own power, using the emotion-stirring word “homeland” to receive the validation of his clapping audience and justifying his barbaric actions, instead of equating a true homeland with the people who dwell within it. Likewise, the dictator is “the director of a great tragedy” (Line 40)—the description alluding to both his control over his people and the fact that he sees his crimes as outside reality—as if the “tragedy” were theater instead of real life.

The speaker also exposes the complicity of some of the population in enabling the dictator’s cruelty, furthering the theatrical imagery by calling the dictator’s supporters an “audience” (Line 41) who “clap” (Line 42) as they witness his abuse of power. This is the final image of power the speaker gives us before transitioning back to the graveyard scene, the place where the end results of all this approbation can be seen. The speaker thus creates an explicit link between the supporters’ complicity in the dictator’s crimes and the outcome of those crimes. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the speaker mentioned earlier in the poem that the unnamed victim had “a nose / that never knew clean air” (Lines 13-14): There is something polluted and filthy about the state of the country, and no one here can breathe freely.