I see in your profile you've quoted Ode to a Grecian Urn. The book contains a reconstruction of that poem. So here's the extract from the book pertaining to that poem:
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When I look for a medium-specific narrative, I try to find one that roughly covers the whole work, one that justifies the work as a unit. Here’s one:
- 1. The narrator questions a silent “thou.”
- 2. The narrator associates the silent (“those unheard are sweeter”) with the eternal (“canst not leave […] nor ever,” “never, never”, “For ever,” etc.).
- 3. The eternal is then associated with repetitions of “happy” and “love” (“Ah, happy, happy boughs!”, “happy melodist”, “More happy love! more happy, happy love!”).
- 4. Finally, when the eternally silent (“Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought as doth eternity”) says something, it addresses the narrator’s questioning (“all ye need to know”) through structures of repetiton, reminiscent of the repetitions of “happy:” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
All the terms of the interpretations are reused and combined in different contexts. In (1), the “silent thou” is asked questions which are addressed in (4). The repetitions of the answer “beauty is truth, truth beauty” echo the repetitions of the words happy and love in (3), but in a non-silent context which contrasts the silence in (1) and (2). A narrative thus emerges.
This narrative is medium-specific in the sense that it takes elements directly from the poem with almost no recourse to subjective interpretation. I say almost, because there is certainly some layer of interpretation there. I did skip many details, even entire parts of the poem. I also didn’t mention the stanza structure or the rhyme schemes. Implicit in these oversights is an assessment that they weren’t needed in the narrative I wanted to highlight. If you study the stanza structure or the poem’s themes, as most scholars do, you get invariants rather than a narrative. But this choice, to prefer this poem-wide narrative over invariants, is already an act of subjective interpretation, even if, in the last analysis, I just highlighted certain passages of the poem and their relationships.
I could cook the interpretation a little bit, because it is a little too raw as it is. I could add some commentary that would express the feelings and value judgments that led me to this narrative. I could say this:
« John Keats thus makes us realize that our questionings are superfluous, in the sense that the answer was already implied in the narrator’s enthusiastic exuberance. The answer is in the rythmic expressivity—whether in the questioning itself (the series of “what”) or in the insistence on eternity, happiness and love—that almost seems to anticipate T.S. Eliot’s criticism of the “grammatically meaningless” statement that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” »
I will usually choose to stay away from this style of writing, but this is a purely personal choice. I personally like to address an audience that doesn’t need to be spoon-fed and will arrive at its own conclusions. In fact, I would argue that the raw interpretation doesn’t need any conclusion. The elements of the narrative are interlinked with one another in such a way that the whole point is lost as soon as one tries to wrap things up in a generic conclusion—i.e., the narrative is self-contained and self-conclusive, somewhat like “beauty is truth, truth beauty” is self-contained and self-conclusive. In fact, any type of value-based conclusion would attract the sort of (rightful) criticism against awkward attempts at penetrating non-objective concepts (like authorial intention or imagination) through objective interpretation, such as Derrida’s criticism of Jean Rousset when the latter tried to describe passion in literature (or at least invite his readers to sense it) using only geometrical concepts like “rings,” “symmetry,” and so on.
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