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.