Meaning & texts: objectivity, subjectivity

I have asserted that meaning is inherently subjective (e.g. here). By that I meaning that the phenomenon of meaning is ontologically subjective, but it may not thereby be epistemologically subjective, to use a distinction made by John Searle. Color is subjective in the same sense, but it is also epistemologically objective: Different observers agree on the color of a given object.

Consider these propositions:

1) That cat is gray.

2) The moon is full tonight.

Taken in context they are surely epistemically objective; no one is going to disagree about what they mean. Now consider these propositions:

3) Cats are mammals.

4) Gray is a color.

Like 1 and 2, they are epistemically objective. However, 1 and 2 are statements about the world while 3 and 4 seem rather like statements about the meanings of words (more or less – this requires a bit of thinking).

Now consider this:

5) The earth revolves around the sun.

It seems rather like 1 and 2, no? Yes, I agree. However, it also seems a bit culture specific. We didn’t always know that the earth revolved around the sun. For millennia we humans thought that the earth was flat and the sun moved through the sky above the earth and disappeared at night; some people still believe that, or something like it (and I’m not thinking about flat-earthism, which strikes me as having an essential element of opposition to modernism).

It required time an effort to establish that the earth revolved around the sun. For that is not something that’s perceptually apparent. Once established, however, it has become epistemologically objective. But, and here’s the point, it DID have to become established.

Now, what do we say about the following text by William Blake, The Sick Rose?

O Rose, thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

Like every other text, its meaning is ontologically subjective. But epistemically, what of that?

I note that it is only relatively recently that we have systematically inquired about the meaning of such texts. Our means of conducting such inquiry are those of literary interpretation, chiefly close reading and its descendants. And the results of such inquiry suggest that their meaning is epistemically subjective as well, not withstanding the assertions of “minimal reading” that Attridge and Staton have made in The Craft of Poetry.

Why should the meaning of such texts remain epistemically subjective while the meaning of 1-5 is epistemically objective (with appropriate qualifications for 5? The obvious meaning would be that texts like The Rick Rose don’t have a public locus of reference like those of 1-5. Is that all there is to it?

What of those poetic texts absent the effort of explicit interpretation? What is their epistemic dimension then? Do they even have one?