ABSTRACT
Harold Fisch was a well-respected Israeli literary critic and scholar, a man whose professional work was rooted in seventeenth-century English literature and on modern fiction and the Bible. This chapter discusses Fisch's criticism, as a model for literary interpretation and demonstrates the general applicability of covenantal hermeneutics through a reading of the poetry of John Keats, a poet whose work may seem resistant to Fisch's approach, but nevertheless reveals a biblical presence. It explores two particularly revealing moments within the 'vale of soul-making' traversed by Keats in his odes, moments when the 'shadowy presence' of the Bible becomes visible. Those two moments are: 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. Keats's exploration of his poetic contraries remains partially hidden; the covenantal critic must provide hermeneutic assistance in the struggle, rescuing the poem from the temptations laid bare and to which it has become exposed, and bringing the world envisioned by the poet into full presence.
