The speaker in these three lines is utterly lost for words. He’s trying to describe what happens when Mary smiles — just a little, gently — and he admits it’s impossible. It’s not simply that she looks beautiful; something far stranger and more powerful occurs. His mind can’t hold it, can’t even recall it properly afterward, because the experience feels completely outside normal life. That’s why he lands on the word “miracle.” And it’s not a tired, second-hand miracle — it’s “new” and “rare,” as if the smile shatters every usual category each time it appears.
You get the sense of someone stunned into silence, almost reverent. There’s no attempt to list her features or give a clever comparison. Instead, the whole mood is one of breathless wonder, a quiet awe at a fleeting moment that feels both intensely personal and cosmically singular. The fragment captures not the smile itself, but the astonishing fact that such a small gesture can leave a person utterly undone.