Meg Merrilies

Composed in the same letter to his sister Fanny as “Meg Merrilies,” “There was a naughty boy” is a charming self-caricature that paints Keats as a rebellious boy packing up for adventure in Scotland (as the real Keats did, against his doctor’s orders). It complements “Meg” in illustrating the poet’s preoccupation in this period with his wild childhood and with an older, kindly wise woman: perhaps his beloved grandmother, who might feature in the poem as “Granny-good.” 

Inspired heavily by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Hyperion and its subsequent revision, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, is Keats’s unfinished epic poem on an episode from Greco-Roman myth, the fall of the Titans. Some of the older female characters bear a passing resemblance to Meg in their sympathetic natures and imposing physicality (e.g., Mnemosyne, Moneta).