The oddest thing about the first line is that the speaker asks a question about their own heart. "What is this that I am feeling" is addressed to no one in particular, and it has no question mark. The sentence simply trails off. In four short lines, tideofmoon sets up a quiet puzzle: a person who smiles, suspects they are in pain, and cannot say for sure. The poem lands on a plain, stubborn truth: a smile is not evidence that nothing is wrong.
Look closely at how the speaker talks about the feeling. They say "this," as though it were an object sitting in front of them, something to be picked up and examined. Then comes "I ought to guess its pain." The word "ought" carries a faint sense of duty, as if anyone in this position should know what they feel and the speaker is falling short. "Guess" is stranger still. We usually guess at other people's moods, or at riddles. Here the speaker has to guess at their own, which makes them a spectator of their own inner life. The pain is assumed, almost taken for granted, yet it stays out of reach.
The third line is the hinge, and the shortest. "But I am smiling" runs only five syllables, after eight in the first line and six in the second. The "but" pushes against everything before it, and the present continuous "am smiling" makes the smile feel ongoing, something happening right now and perhaps being kept up. The poem never says whether the smile is a mask, a reflex, or a real flicker of happiness. That openness is deliberate, and it is part of the poem's honesty. The speaker does not claim to understand the smile any better than the pain.
Then the last line stretches to ten syllables and changes everything: "And smiling doesn't mean you are not hurt." Two shifts happen here. The word "smiling" returns, now as the subject of a general rule rather than a private fact. And the pronoun moves from "I" to "you," so a confession becomes a statement addressed to the reader, or perhaps to the speaker, talking themselves into believing it. The line also loops through a double negative, "doesn't mean… not hurt," a slightly tangled construction that sounds like someone working the idea out as they say it. "Hurt" takes the place of "pain" and is plainer, more bodily, and it is the final word. A single hard syllable closes the poem like a door.
The sound and shape of the poem support this. There is no regular rhyme scheme, but "feeling" and "smiling" echo each other with the same ending, which quietly ties the two lines together. Feeling and smiling are the poem's two poles: what is inside and what shows on the face. The poem also has no punctuation until the final period. The first three lines hang open, unresolved, just as the speaker's feelings are, and only the closing maxim gets a full stop. The title is just three asterisks, so the poem is effectively untitled, which suits a feeling that has not yet been named.
The poem has almost no concrete imagery. The only picture is the smile itself, a face turned outward. That sparseness is a strength. Without scenery or metaphor, the reader has nothing to look at except the gap between the face and whatever lies behind it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It takes an experience many people know, being cheerful on the surface and uncertain underneath, and gives it permission to exist. It does not insist the speaker is secretly devastated, and it does not tidy the confusion away. Its last line works like a sentence you might say to a friend, or hope someone would say to you. In a world that reads faces as if they were answers, the poem argues that a face can be wrong, even to the person wearing it.