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John KeatsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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.
By John Keats
Endymion
Endymion: A Poetic Romance
John Keats
La Belle Dame sans Merci
La Belle Dame sans Merci
John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode on a Grecian Urn
John Keats
Ode on Melancholy
Ode on Melancholy
John Keats
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats
Ode to Psyche
Ode to Psyche
John Keats
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
John Keats
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
John Keats
The Eve of St. Agnes
The Eve of St. Agnes
John Keats
To Autumn
To Autumn
John Keats
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
John Keats