15 pages • 30 minutes read
John KeatsMeg Merrilies
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1818A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form, Meter, and Rhythm
“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
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