Five short lines are enough to turn a bedtime routine into a burial. The title, "Beautification," sounds like something from a council brochure or a cosmetic clinic: long, Latinate, faintly bureaucratic. The poem itself then speaks in short, plain words. The gap between that official-sounding title and the bare language below it is where much of the poem's dry humour, and its chill, comes from.
The speaker says "Made myself fine," and the missing "I" makes the statement brisk, like a note jotted down. "Fine" carries a few meanings at once. It can mean delicate or well-dressed, and it is also the word we say when we mean "nothing to see here." The next line pulls the rug away: the result is "like a grave in the garden." The simile compares the speaker to the grave, not to the flowers around it. That suggests the grooming is a kind of landscaping, a neat finish laid over a hole. A grave in a garden is also domestic and intimate, not a distant cemetery plot. The speaker is both the ground and the person tending it.
The second half moves into the language of property. After a dash, which works like a hinge, we get "my estate which I lease." Estate means land, but it also means everything a person leaves behind at death, so the word looks both ways. "Lease" undercuts the ownership: a leaseholder never fully owns the place. The body here is a rented property, and the speaker is a landlord who has already let it go. The tenant arrives in the last lines: "wormwood." The plant is known for its bitterness, and it could plausibly grow in a garden, so the word stays inside the poem's imagery. Yet it splits into "worm" and "wood," which suggests the creature that eats the body and, I would argue, the timber of a coffin. The tenant's name contains the whole eviction notice. The poem never says what rent is paid, but given the plant, bitterness seems a fair guess.
The form helps all this along. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only free verse. The lines run roughly four, seven, six, three and three syllables, so they swell in the middle and then shrink, as if the poem were narrowing to a plot of earth. The sound patterns are quiet but noticeable. "Made," "grave" and "estate" share a long *a*, which gives the first half a low, tolling sound. The first line ends on "fine" and the last on "night," and the matching vowel works as a faint rhyme that links the cheerful claim to its darker answer. There is no full stop at the end, so "every night" hangs open. The lease is not a one-off but a routine that renews itself. The poem does not say what happens at night, but sleep, a nightly rehearsal for being absent, seems a natural reading.
The poem matters because it gets a great deal out of so little. Reminding readers that bodies decay is an old and heavy subject, but here the tone is wry and almost businesslike. The speaker talks about mortality in the voice of someone drawing up paperwork, and that calm makes it more unsettling than lament would. The poem also turns an everyday act, getting ready, into a question: who or what is all this tidying for? Anyone who has checked a mirror before leaving the house can feel the sting. The garden is lovely, and it is still sitting on a lease.