Meg Merrilies

“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.