Meg Merrilies

In “Meg Merrilies,” Keats deploys the 19th-century stereotype of the “Gipsy” as a symbol of Romantic freedom, as did many authors of his age. Problematic echoes of these treatments carry down into our own day. The word “gypsy” is now considered a slur by some Romani people, in no small part because these literary representations othered Romani women as wild, foreign, or seductive (e.g., Victor Hugo’s Esmerelda, Georges Bizet’s Carmen).

Meg’s identity as a Roma woman functions on two levels in “Meg Merrilies”: personal and literary. On a personal level, Meg was a natural subject for Keats on his walking tour. Unlike many literary Roma, Meg is Scottish rather than English, and Keats was enamored with the Scottish countryside at the time of composition. He might have seen something of himself, too, in Meg’s itinerant lifestyle. As she wandered the moors, living “as she did please,” so did he (Line 12). Though Keats’s doctor warned him against making such a journey, the poet indulged in a spur-of-the-moment, spontaneous decision to go to Scotland anyway, an act of rebellion he explores in his poem, “There was a naughty boy.” Though Keats alludes to the topic playfully, this air of criminality is a common stereotype against Romani people.