Meg Merrilies

“Meg Merrilies” (sometimes titled “Old Meg she was a gipsy” or simply “old Meg”) is a short, playful ballad by the English Romantic poet John Keats. It was written on Keats’s walking tour of northern England and Scotland in 1818. At the time, Keats was worried about the health of his brother, Tom, and about his own health; the tuberculosis that would soon kill Tom had already begun to manifest in Keats. While his doctor advised against the journey, Keats needed a brief respite from Tom’s sickbed and packed up for the trip.

The 1818 walking tour represented a creative, nostalgic time for Keats. As he faced his own mortality at the young age of 23 (Keats would die of tuberculosis two years later, at age 25), his thoughts dwelled on the past, particularly on his childhood, his grandmother, and his siblings. Keats was close with his brothers and sister—Tom, George, and Fanny—and this period saw the siblings distressed by their physical and geographical separation. “Meg Merrilies” was written in concurrent letters to Tom and Fanny from Scotland.

Keats borrows the character of Meg from Walter Scott’s 1815 novel Guy Mannering. In Scott’s narrative, Meg is a matriarch in the Romani community. An oracular, almost supernatural figure, she both generously cares for and righteously curses those who deserve it. According to Keats’s companion on the walking tour, Charles Brown, Keats had not read Scott’s novel when he wrote “Meg Merrilies.” Rather, Charles described the plot to him and Keats, enchanted by the story and a particularly idyllic Scottish scene, composed the ballad on the spot. It is likely that Keats was at least familiar with the character of Meg beforehand. Even if he had not read the book, an immensely popular 1817-1818 stage production of Guy Mannering made Meg a household name in Britain.

The poem showcases many hallmarks of the English Romantic movement, in which personal crises (like Keats’s mortality) were mediated through the exploration of nature and the idealization of freedom. “Meg” celebrates and romanticizes the untamed wilds and the everyday man (or in this case, woman), and zeroes in on the Romantic themes of solitude, melancholy, and the experience of the individual. That being said, “Meg” has received substantially less attention than some of Keats’s more famous poems like “Ode to a Nightingale” and “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Keats himself dismissed the poem as “too much of a trifle to be copied” (Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. Volume I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958, pages 437-8). Perhaps due to this—and to its deceptively simple tone—the poem has been largely overlooked by scholars until recently.

Poet Biography

Born in 1795 to a family of modest means, John Keats rose from humble origins to become one of England’s most famous poets. His life, cut short at the young age of 25, was marked by tragedy. His father was killed in a riding accident when Keats was eight years old; his mother abandoned their family for five years, only to return and pass away from tuberculosis soon after. These experiences deepened the bond between Keats and his siblings, as well as his relationship with his maternal grandmother, Alice Jennings, who raised them.

Keats was a star pupil in his childhood years, but as a young man, his formal training was in medicine, not the arts. Keats, one of the most renowned poets of European literature, had no literary education at a higher level. He was shaped most of all by the library of his headmaster from boyhood, John Clarke, as well as Leigh Hunt’s literary magazine The Examiner. In his early years, he worked at translating classical works like Virgil’s Aeneid, but it was Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene that activated him as a poet. Its concentration on aesthetics and sensualities would heavily influence his work. As Keats famously concluded in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “‘Beauty is truth, and truth beauty’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Keats soon entered the orbit of Leigh Hunt and his literary and artistic circle, where he bumped shoulders with Romantic luminaries like Percy Bysshe Shelley. Now considered one of the three canonical writers of the so-called “second generation” of Romantics, his works were, for the most part, poorly received in his lifetime. In 1821, he died at the age of 25 from tuberculosis.

Poem Text

Old Meg she was a Gipsy,

      And liv’d upon the Moors:

Her bed it was the brown heath turf,

      And her house was out of doors.

Her apples were swart blackberries,

      Her currants pods o’ broom;

Her wine was dew of the wild white rose,

      Her book a churchyard tomb.

Her Brothers were the craggy hills,

      Her Sisters larchen trees—

Alone with her great family

      She liv’d as she did please.

No breakfast had she many a morn,

      No dinner many a noon,

And ‘stead of supper she would stare

      Full hard against the Moon.

But every morn of woodbine fresh

      She made her garlanding,

And every night the dark glen Yew

      She wove, and she would sing.

And with her fingers old and brown

      She plaited Mats o’ Rushes,

And gave them to the Cottagers

      She met among the Bushes.

Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen

      And tall as Amazon:

An old red blanket cloak she wore;

      A chip hat had she on.

God rest her aged bones somewhere—

      She died full long agone!

Keats, John. "Meg Merrilies." 1818. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Meg Merrilies was a Romani woman who lived outside on the moors, the rough, uncultivated highlands of Scotland. Her bed “was the brown heath turf,” and she lived on a diet of foragables: dark (“swart”) blackberries and pods o’ broom, the furry legume seed pods of the Scotch broom plant (Line 5). For wine, she had the dew that pools upon wild roses, and for reading materials, the epitaphs on the gravestones of a churchyard.

She lived a solitary existence with family of a different sort—the craggy hills were her brothers, the larchen trees, her sisters. She enjoyed a free life in the wilderness, but it was not without its discomforts. She sometimes had to skip meals, staring “full hard” at the moon rather than eating supper (Line 16).

She maintained a reliable routine. In the morning she made garlands of woodbine (honeysuckle), and in the evening, garlands of yew. She also wove mats of rushes, a type of grass, with her “fingers old and brown,” and generously gifted the mats to the Cottagers, other people who lived out in the wilds (Line 21).

Meg was a physically imposing person. Brave as the Queen of England and tall as an Amazon (legendary warrior women in Greek mythology), she wore the typical garb of a lower-class person: a chip hat (a type of bonnet) and an old, red cloak. The speaker hopes she rests in peace, as she died long ago.