The Beauties of the Named Land
The Beauties of the Named Land
by A.J. Huffman
The Italian showed. (No surprise.)
The language, like all born with the full expectation,
should tongue conversation.
Then renewed: the question regarding the engraving.
It was important.
Explained.
(The poet might find his burial.)
We believe from sorrow: He deserves a churchyard.
A complex little knot of a poem whose unraveling may be in the title. “The Beauties (It’s about language, spoken and written, and the art of that.) of the Named Land” (giving expression a name–“Italian”–so it can be “explained”) designates the place where “the poet might find his burial”: civilization’s traditional “churchyard” the traditional expresser of “sorrow…deserves.” It neatly ties up personal expression into our general conception of it; beautiful in those terms but also limiting. Irony here, I “believe.”