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.