<span>"Counting Small-Boned Bodies" is a short poem of ten lines and, as its title suggests, plays upon official body counts of dead Vietnamese soldiers. The poem's first line, "Let's count the bodies over again," is followed by three tercets, each of which begins with the same line: "If we could only make the bodies smaller." That condition granted, Bly postulates three successive images: a plain of skulls in the moonlight, the bodies "in front of us on a desk," and a body fit into a finger ring which would be, in the poem's last words, "a keepsake forever." One notes in this that Bly uses imagery not unlike that of the pre-Vietnam poems, especially in the image of the moonlit plain.</span>
By being privy to Granny’s death, the reader can infer much about her life. The title describes the enormous hurt and humiliation that has secretly festered in her mind and heart for sixty years. Her great pride was devastated by her jilting; although she married a good man, raised a family, and managed a farm by herself after her husband’s death, she never totally got over the shock and disappointment of George’s rejection. The fact that she has saved George’s letters suggests how much he continued to mean to her in her heart and how the pain of her jilting remained with her for sixty years.
