I First level of meaning
Upon first reading, you will probably establish that this is a tragic love story which unfolds between a Medieval mounted soldier, a knight, and a strange, beautiful young woman. However, with this reading, a whole lot of things will remain unexplained in the text. Who actually is this lady? Why is the title in French? Why are there a lily and a rose on the face of the knight? Why not a daffodil and a tulip? Why do they go to a cave? Why do they kiss and part afterwards? Why is the number of the kisses four, why not eight or eleven?
In order to explain all the elements of the text, and arrive at more complex levels of meaning, we are going to go through a number of steps in our process of interpretation.
1. Formal characteristic features
We will realize that the form and the general appearance of the text already precondition us for reading, influence our horizon of expectations. We learn right at the beginning that the text is by John Keats, a prominent figure of the second generation of British Romantic poets, so we will expect something romantic. The subtitle says that this is going to be a ballad, so we will expect story-telling, dialogues, vivid poetic images, and probably a gloomy or even tragic atmosphere, with themes of love or history. These expectations are all satisfied when we read the text.
When we further examine the form of the text, we realize that it is highly organized. It has a framed structure, with the first and the last stanzas almost identical. The twelve stanzas are also structured internally, which we will see when we observe the dominant agents or voices. In the first three stanzas a narrator is speaking questioning a knight-at-arms. In stanzas four through six the dominant voice is that of the knight: he starts answering the question by telling a story, and each stanza starts with “I”. In stanzas seven through nine the knight continues to tell the story, but the dominant agent is the other-worldly lady, and each stanza starts with “she”. In stanzas ten through twelve the dominant voice is again the knight, and he tells us the sad outcome of the encounter and the love affair with the supernatural woman. So structurally we get a 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 composition, each 3-stanza unit being dominated by a different agent. However, our initial questions are still not answered.
2. Worlds
On the basis of this structure and the dominant agents in the units, we can also establish that each unit represents a different world, and there is change, movement in between these worlds. The first world is the narrator’s, and it is actually the same as the world of the last unit (W3): the cold, lonely, harsh reality in a winter-like natural setting. The second unit is the world of the knight (W1), the third unit is the world of the lady (W2), and in the fourth unit we get to the end of the story, and we also arrive in the world which is the one at the beginning of the text, when the narrator starts asking the questions (W3). The story is about getting from the summer-like word of the knight into the supernatural world of the lady, and from there, through horrible dreams, to the world of winter and loneliness, where the knight now is wondering alone and depressed:
W 3 
W 1 W 2 W 3
3. Relevant attributes and their connotative meanings
We now see that the text is a highly organized poem, but we still do not understand every element, and we are stuck at the level of the love story. In the next step, we are going to collect the relevant attributes of the voices, agents or characters in the text, and we will try to check whether these attributes have extra, connotative meanings other than their customary, primary, that is, denotative meanings.
Knight-at-Arms: mounted soldier in medieval times, protects his feudal lord and ladies; he must be skilled in military exercises as well as various forms of art: singing, writing poetry, playing chess; he has a sick lily and a fading rose on his face; he rides a horse; he puts the lady on his horse and gives her four kisses.
The Lady: supernatural, a “faery’s child”, wild, she speaks a strange language, she bends, moans, and moves rhythmically, she comes from a different world, she gets a bracelet and a garland from the knight, she takes him to her elfin grot where she finds him supernatural food, but before their love could be consummated, she weeps and lulls the knight asleep.
The horse: the horse is associated here with rhythm since it is a pacing steed, and we might also associate it with classical literature, mythology and the figure of Pegasus.
The narrator: we do not get to know anything about him except that he has a very friendly, warm attitude to the knight.
When all this is seen as a whole picture, we may start suspecting that the process and the characters here may have to do something with artistic things or poetry itself. The Knight can be understood as a figure of the romantic poet who is looking for inspiration in the typically romantic natural setting in W 1. The Lady arrives from a different, supernatural world, just like the Muse arrives from the world of imagination in classical literature, and this idea is enforced by the fact that she gets a garland on her head, a traditional attribute of the Muse, and also a bracelet, which is the symbol of eternity and perfection.
Once the poet receives inspiration, he puts inspiration and technique together, that is, the Knight puts the Lady on the Horse, and thus theme and rhythm, topic and technique, inspiration and poetic talent are united.
From the meadow they get even deeper into nature, since the supernatural Muse takes the Poet into a cave. The cave is an ancient symbol of femininity, of the womb, the place of conception and creation. Here the muse and the poet unite, and the number four as a symbol of perfection in number symbolism expresses that something is brought to perfection, readiness here. Something is born, which, in our line of thought, is indeed the poem, which is the result of the meeting of poetic skill and imaginative inspiration. However, after this meeting the Poet falls into a trance, a dream in which nightmares reveal to him that he is doomed, enthralled by the “unmerciful beautiful lady.” The fate of the Poet, thus, is to long for the Lady, the Muse ever after this encounter, to walk lonely in the world of earthly reality and continuously crave for the world the Lady, for inspiration to come, so that a new poem could be born.