Meg Merrilies

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1818

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Summary

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form, Meter, and Rhythm

“Meg Merrilies” is a literary ballad, a poetic form based on popular narrative songs that often concentrated on a single hero (or heroine) and their story. Traditionally, English ballads were meant to be sung. As such, they often have a musical quality about them.

Keats’s poem consists of six rhymed quatrains, or sections of four lines. It concludes with a slightly longer final stanza that tacks on an extra two lines. It is written in the common meter traditional of ballads, which means the lines alternate between four-stresses (iambic tetrameter) and three-stresses each (iambic trimeter). These lines are called “iambic” because they are made up of iambs, a metrical foot that consists of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.

A typical, two-line unit in “Meg Merrilies” scans like this (stressed syllables in bold):

Her ap- | ples were | swart black- | ber-ries,

Her cur- | rants pods | o’ broom

Like other ballads, its rhyme scheme is ABCB, which means the second and fourth lines of each quatrain rhyme, but the first and third do not.

Imagery

Keats was deeply moved and inspired by the beauty of the Scottish highlands. In typical Romantic form, he was interested in channeling the aesthetic beauty of nature into a pleasant and thought-provoking sensory experience for the reader. For example, he invites us to picture the rich blackness of the berries on the moors (Line 5), and the pleasing contrast between the “fresh” woodbine and “dark glen” yew (Lines 17-19).

Sound Devices

Sound devices, which create feeling via the aural effect of words, lend to the song-like quality of “Meg Merrilies.” Alliteration—using words that begin with the same letter—can be seen in “wild white rose” (Line 7) and “stead of supper” (Line 15). Assonance, the repetition of internal vowel sounds, is present as well. Keats is particularly fond of the oo sound and uses it throughout (“Moors” [Line 2], “broom” [Line 6], “book” [Line 8], “noon” [Line 14], “Moon” [Line 16], “woodbine” [Line 17]).