Everything a child is taught to fear arrives here wearing a hair ribbon. The speaker remembers being "warned about" a dragon, a word that promises scales, fire and teeth. What the poem delivers is a figure with "big blue bows," "clean-cut nails" and "lips dyed purple from constant lollipops." Its central idea is that danger rarely looks dangerous, and that the sweetest surface may be the one covering decay. The final line says it outright, "because sugar rots," and it sounds exactly like something an adult says to a child.
That borrowed voice is the poem's cleverest move. "Sugar rots" is ordinary dental advice, the reason given for why you can't have another sweet. Attached to a dragon, a nursery rule becomes a moral one: sweetness that is constant, cultivated and worn like an accessory is not innocent. The word "because" does a great deal of work. It is the word of a parent closing an argument, and it comes after a blank line, alone in its own stanza, so the poem seems to stop and let the verdict sit. It also explains nothing about the dragon directly. We have to connect rot and ribbon ourselves.
The construction is a study in contrast. The opening line is long and unhurried, close to a regular ten-syllable line, with the lilt of a story told at bedtime. Then the lines shrink into short, heavy phrases. "Wears big blue bows" has three strong beats and a bouncing b sound, which gives it the toy-like jingle of a nursery rhyme. The fourth line stretches out again and ends on "constant lollipops," where the l and p sounds feel sticky and the bouncing rhythm of "lollipops" mimics the thing itself. Then the poem snaps shut on its shortest line, where the soft s of "sugar" ends in the clipped t of "rots." There is no rhyme anywhere, as if the poem refuses the cheerful chime that sweets and children's verse promise. The lowercase "i" and the lack of punctuation keep the voice casual, almost childlike, which suits a memory of childhood warnings.
The imagery is built from grooming. Bows, nails and lips are all things someone has taken care over. "Clean-cut" suggests wholesomeness, but it also contains the word "cut": a dragon's claws, trimmed and tidy, are still claws, and the weapon has simply been manicured. "Dyed" is a striking choice over "painted" or "stained." It suggests colour soaked deliberately into the lips, as into fabric. Purple can also recall a bruise, though that is an association rather than something the poem states. The palette of blue and purple is cool and candy-bright, and the red of dragon fire has been replaced entirely. Perhaps the most important word is "constant." It turns an indulgence into a compulsion, so the figure is not merely sweet but defined by sweetness, maybe even trapped in it.
The title adds another layer. «Bury Her With A Smile» is a funeral instruction, an imperative in the same bossy register as the warning. "Her" suggests the dragon is a woman or girl, and the command could mean several things. The smile might be a mask kept in place even in the grave, or a last courtesy paid to something once feared. It might even be a sly victory over the dragon's own sweetness. The poem does not choose between these, which keeps it from settling into a simple moral.
Its significance lies in that restraint. In six lines it turns the fairy-tale dragon inside out, so that the monster is a neat, ribboned figure who could pass in any playground. It also leaves open whether the warning was wise. The speaker only reports that they were "warned," and bows, polished nails and lollipops are all things often coded as girlish. So "sugar rots" may be wisdom, or it may be the kind of suspicion that adults hand down without examining, and the poem lets a reader feel both possibilities in the space after that final, confident "because."