After Baltasar Gracián’s worldly wisdom, the thirteenth Penguin Little Black Classic brings us back to poetry. This time, the poetry reads like poetry.

Unlike Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, where the verse often flows like elevated prose, Keats writes the sort of poetry most of us imagine when we hear the word: rhyme, rhythm, melody and romance. The little volume contains five poems by John Keats: The Eve of St Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Lamia, Ode to Psyche and Ode on a Grecian Urn.

This was not my first encounter with Keats. I first met him in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, where the poet appears as one of the novel’s most memorable characters. Ever since then, I had wanted to read Keats himself. Like my attempts at reading poetry in general, however, that intention kept being postponed.

So I was pleased to finally make his acquaintance. In this post, rather than attempting to review poems that have been admired for over two centuries, I would rather talk about what happened while I was reading them.

The first poem, The Eve of St Agnes, turned out to be an ideal introduction.

It has everything a newcomer could hope for: atmosphere, memorable characters, a love story and genuine suspense.

Madeline hopes that by observing the rituals of St Agnes’ Eve she will dream of the man she loves, Porphyro. There is only one difficulty. Porphyro belongs to a family her relatives despise. Should they discover him inside the castle, they will almost certainly kill him.

When you want to make a love story unforgettable, make the lovers star-crossed. Shakespeare understood that. So did Keats.

The story itself is straightforward. Reading the poem was not.

At first, I found myself stumbling through the lines. The rhythm escaped me, and the sentences felt strangely broken. Then, almost by accident, I tried reading the poem aloud. And everything changed.

The rhythm revealed itself. The rhyme no longer felt decorative but became part of the storytelling. I stopped reading words on a page and started hearing a voice. For the rest of the book, I read Keats aloud. That simple change transformed my experience.

The next poem, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, is even referenced within The Eve of St Agnes itself.

Porphyro wakes Madeline by playing the old ballad of the beautiful but merciless lady who destroys the knight who falls in love with her. After reading the ballad, I found myself wondering why.

Madeline lies asleep peacefully in her own home. If anyone is in danger, it is surely Porphyro. Yet Keats makes him play this song on his lute. I found it intriguing.

Next is Lamia, the longest poem in the collection. And it felt unexpectedly familiar.

It tells the story of a serpent transformed into a beautiful woman who falls in love with Lycius. Eventually the philosopher Apollonius sees through the illusion, and tragedy follows.

At the end of the poem, Apollonius says – Fool, fool, fool in a gruff voice full of contempt.

“From every ill of life have I preserved thee to this day, And shall I see thee made a serpent’s prey?”

I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps that is because I was reading Keats as an Indian. Our folklore is filled with shape-shifting serpents. We have stories about them, films about them and even television series devoted to them. Naagin recently concluded its seventh season. We tend to read serpents with sympathy as often as suspicion.

Maybe quite a few won’t get this context, but while I was reading, in my mind a parallel story of the Hindi movie Nagina was going on. And at the end, (I know, Apollonius is a sage and all), Amrish Puri wins in this one.

That cultural difference made me wonder whether readers from different traditions experience Lamia in entirely different ways.

The collection concludes with Ode to Psyche and Ode on a Grecian Urn, two of Keats’  celebrated poems from his Odes. I suspect I shall return to them again, because they deserve more attention than a first reading can give.

A few books ago, I wrote that if I continued reading poetry, perhaps I would eventually learn to appreciate it. Keats has taken me another step along that road. Whitman taught me that poetry need not rhyme. Keats taught me that poetry sometimes needs to be heard before it can truly be understood. And that has given me a gateway to experience poems. The learning – you don’t read poetry, you experience it. Let’s see where the next book takes me.