Meg Merrilies

By using the traditional poetic form of the ballad, John Keats evokes the lean, rustic lifestyle of his heroine, Meg Merrilies. The first stanza establishes Meg as a “Gipsy”; for the Romantics, a picturesque ideal of independence. A nomadic and staunchly anti-establishment ethnic minority, the Roma suffered a long history of ostracization and oppression in mainland Europe. Keats idealizes this experience as a hard-bitten life of freedom from the rules. He sets up playful inversions by listing Meg’s equivalents to a “civilized” lifestyle. She slept not on a bed but the turf, and paradoxically her “house” was the absence of a house: the outdoors.

Her food, mentioned in Stanza 2, carries on the theme. Apples and currants are the products of human cultivation. Edible apples are best produced in orchards, while currants—dried berries—were ingredients in labor-intensive dishes like puddings, mincemeat, and jams. Most importantly, the production of both requires constant inhabitation of one place. Orchards can take decades to cultivate; currants were associated with the English cottage lifestyle. Meg, in contrast, did not farm or cook; she foraged, dining on blackberries and broom beans and drinking the “wine” of dew on roses. She visited graveyards too, further establishing her as a liminal presence on the margins of society.

Unlike the Meg of Walter Scott’s novel, this Meg had no family or human companions. Instead, her siblings were the “craggy hills” and “larchen trees,” whom Keats personifies as if they were people. In linking Meg to them, Keats almost suggests Meg is a feature of the landscape, a sort of “spirit” of Scotland who achieved perfect communion with nature. Crucial to the Romantic mindset, Meg was content with this private, interior existence. Not subject to the constraints and expectations of materialistic society, she “liv’d as she did please” (Line 12).

This lifestyle, Keats admits, was not without its trials. Meg often went hungry, as he describes in Stanza 4. The use of anaphora—the duplication of the beginning of a phrase (“No breakfast […] / No dinner […],” Lines 13-14)—emphasizes that this was a repeat occurrence. However, Meg’s struggles are not lingered on too seriously; in some ways they are romanticized. When she was hungry, Keats describes not the gnaw of her stomach but a noble, rebellious image of her staring “Full hard against the Moon” (Line 16).

While Meg primarily led a solitary existence in union with nature—the Romantic ideal—she was also a productive member of her community. She created items of aesthetic beauty (garlands) and practicality (mats), which she generously gifted to her neighbors. She retained a fundamental sense of humanity, despite her disconnection from it.

In the final stanza, Keats elevates Meg from othered outsider to quasi-mythical, heroic status. He compares her to a stately Queen of England and a powerful Amazon. In doing so, he completes an inspiring portrait of human vulnerability and resilience. While Meg was not immune from human needs, she was determined to forge a path of kindhearted self-sufficiency anyway, which for Keats, made her equal to a queen.

He concludes by surprising the reader with news of Meg’s death. Mirroring the anonymity that defined her life, the speaker hopes that Meg’s bones rest in peace “somewhere”—Meg has no marked grave. This, combined with his placing her in the distant, hazy past (“She died full long agone!”, Line 30), relegates Meg to the mists of myth and legend, as perhaps such a person must be.