Meg Merrilies

Instead of books, Keats tells us, Meg reads tombstones in the graveyard (Line 8). Instead of eating, she sometimes stares “Full hard against the Moon” (Lines 15-6). She weaves garlands and mats of rushes, singing as she works (Lines 17-20). All of these activities place Meg in a long literary tradition of witches and magic women. Witches often live in graveyards—the outskirts of society—and moon-watching, weaving, and singing represent their oracular activities. Walter Scott’s character was overtly supernatural, and Keats, trained in the classics, would have also been familiar with many ancient witches who took part in these activities (e.g., Homer’s Circe, Euripides’s Medea, Lucan’s Erichtho). While Keats roots his poem primarily in Meg’s sympathetic humanity, he also hints at her potentially magical nature.

In Stanza 5, Keats describes Meg as weaving garlands of woodbine in the morning and yew in the evening. Woodbine is another name for honeysuckle, a fragrant climbing plant with sweet, edible flowers, well suited for an image of bright, happy mornings. Yew, on the other hand, is a bitter and poisonous evergreen. It has folkloric associations with death, churchyards, and cemeteries. By depicting Meg at equal ease working with cheery woodbine and gloomy yew, Keats portrays her as someone who can weather the good and bad parts of life.