“In return for
your dish of filberts, I have gathered a few Catkins, I hope they’ll look
pretty. To J.H.R. In answer to his Robin Hood sonnets.” (122) Thusly does John
Keats conclude a short letter to his friend John Reynolds, followed by two
poems: “Robin Hood,” and “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern.” Both poems are meant,
in part, to serve simply as clever replies to Reynolds’s work; they are witty
and thoughtful responses on Keats’s part. Beyond simply responding to his
contemporary’s letter, however, Keats has drawn up an interesting piece that
stands, solidly, on its own. “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern” feels mildly
nostalgic, but Keats adds an unexpected bite of mystery to the familiar
subject, establishing by way of certain rhetoric and allusions a sense of
mythology and lore to his poem. Keats goes so far as to conjure a comparison of
the Mermaid Tavern to Paradise in order to best illustrate the
other-worldliness of the old inn. Additionally, his rondeau- repeating the
question “what Elysium have ye known…choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?” (469-70)
hints at the importance of the place, suggesting that it provided more than
heaven could to the poets who ate and drank there.
Keats’s “Lines”
could easily take on the tone of one of his odes: dedicatory, sentimental.
Keats writes about the Mermaid Tavern in such a way that the resulting poem is
less a verse of praise and more of a story; he aims to convey his reverence for
the tavern by creating a myth about it, as opposed to blatantly glorifying the
place. A master at choosing and arranging (and sometimes creating) words to
best explain and describe his ideas, Keats peppers “Lines” with imagery that
creates a gauzy scene: “underneath a new-old sign/sipping beverage divine/and
pledging with contented smack/the Mermaid in the Zodiac.” (469-70) This passage
in particular brings to mind a poet, sipping quietly in a dusky corner: the
perfect shadowy hero of a medieval fantasy.
Besides the use of
rhetoric to create mystery within “the Mermaid Tavern,” Keats plays with
characters from pre-existing legends, alluding to the Robin Hood fable in the
first stanza. Partly a response to Reynolds’s poems about the adventurer,
Keat’s reference clothes his “poets dead and gone,” giving them form and
developing his poem’s inclination towards myth: “drest as though bold Robin
Hood/would, with his maid Marian,/sup and bowse from horn and can.” (469) Further mention of anonymous
legendary figures and symbols- an astrologer, the Zodiac- mist over “Lines on
the Mermaid Tavern” with just enough fairy-tale vernacular to make the tavern’s
obvious nostalgic import soften with sensational fog.
Structurally,
too, “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern” becomes a story from a verse. A master of
elevated forms of poetry (his odes speak for themselves on this point), Keats
deviates from his usual eloquence and gets playful with his rhymes. Couplets
compose the stanzas of “Lines” and lend a lighthearted air to the poem, imparting
a feel almost like that of a nursery rhyme. Rhetorical questions (“what Elysium
have ye know…choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?” and “have ye tippled drink more
fine/than mine host’s Canary wine,” for example) demand the reader to dream,
creating a fable by way of engaging his imagination.
The
subject of “Lines” is the Mermaid Tavern, once a popular destination for a
circle of Elizabethan writers, including Francis Beaumont, Ben Jonson, and John
Fletcher. Keats’s poem partially addresses the “souls of [these] poets dead and
gone,” knowingly prying for a comparison that might confirm the tavern’s place
in the old wordsmiths’ lives. Not only does Keats manage to make the Mermaid
Tavern the subject of a two-stanza legend, but he ably tells his audience just how
significant a place it was, comparing its “dainty pies” and “Canary wine” to
the “fruits of paradise” and suggesting that, to the poets in question, the
Mermaid Tavern was a sort of heaven.
Literary round
tables are timeless and ubiquitous, and invaluable to the writers who frequent
them. Providing a home base and offering a commune where conversation and ideas
are imbibed as much as drink, such havens are often as important to the souls
who find respite and stimulation there as a Christian paradise. Keats keenly
observes that the Mermaid Tavern was such a place for the Elizabethan
dramatists he admired, and leads his reader to the same conclusion as he asks,
with an answer already in mind, whether or not the fineries of heaven can
compete with the comfort and-most importantly- the sense of place that the
Mermaid Tavern provided its regulars.
Perhaps Keats
makes no great thematic statement with “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern.” The poem
is not socially caustic, nor is it philosophically dramatic. It is first a
playful reply to a friend’s letter, although with further reading, is also an
example of Keat’s mastery of language and verse form. He uses both, by choosing
words and allusions to fill the lines of a poem rhymed in an unusually
whimsical form, to create a myth about his subject. Repeated queries as to the
outcome of a dining-room comparison between the offerings of paradise and the
Mermaid Tavern convey the spiritual importance of the inn to the writers who
frequented its corners. Responding to Reynolds’s lines on the Robin Hood tale,
Keats writes a little myth of his own, about a real-life legendary place.
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