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Instead of books, Keats tells us, Meg reads tombstones in the graveyard (Line 8). Instead of eating, she sometimes stares “Full hard against the Moon” (Lines 15-6). She weaves garlands and mats of rushes, singing as she works (Lines 17-20). All of these activities place Meg in a long literary tradition of witches and magic women. Witches often live in graveyards—the outskirts of society—and moon-watching, weaving, and singing represent their oracular activities. Walter Scott’s character was overtly supernatural, and Keats, trained in the classics, would have also been familiar with many ancient witches who took part in these activities (e.g., Homer’s Circe, Euripides’s Medea, Lucan’s Erichtho). While Keats roots his poem primarily in Meg’s sympathetic humanity, he also hints at her potentially magical nature.
In Stanza 5, Keats describes Meg as weaving garlands of woodbine in the morning and yew in the evening. Woodbine is another name for honeysuckle, a fragrant climbing plant with sweet, edible flowers, well suited for an image of bright, happy mornings. Yew, on the other hand, is a bitter and poisonous evergreen. It has folkloric associations with death, churchyards, and cemeteries. By depicting Meg at equal ease working with cheery woodbine and gloomy yew, Keats portrays her as someone who can weather the good and bad parts of life.
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mary Mapes Dodge, George Darley, William Motherwell, George Eliot, John Milton, Clement Scott, George Arnold, Robert Browning, James Thomson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., William Ernest Henley, Denis Florence MacCarthy, William Cullen Bryant, John Sterling, John Clare, Izaak Walton, Matthew Arnold, James Whitcomb Riley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edward Jenner, William Gilmore Simms, Charles G.D. Roberts, Henry Timrod, William Cox Bennett, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, George MacDonald, William Shakespeare, Matthias Claudius, Alexander Hume, James Beattie, Thomas Gray, Craig Franklin, John Cunningham, Norman Rowland Gale, James Gates Percival, Joel Benton, Thomas Heywood, Richard Hovey, Anna Boynton Averill, Charles Sangster, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dora Hill Read Goodale, Joanna Baillie, Thomas Nashe, Henry Wotton, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, John Howard Bryant, John G.C. Brainard, Thomas Campbell, Eduard Mörike, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, David Gray, William Cowper, W.B. Yeats, William Prescott Foster, Richard Henry Dana Jr., Thomas Carew, William Howitt, John B. Tabb, Jones Very, Henry Fielding, Barry Cornwall, Samuel Daniel, John Keats, Homer, George Francis Savage-Armstrong, John Leyden, Tomas Peter, Thomas Hood, Philip Pendleton Cooke, Richard Watson Gilder, Ethelwyn Wetherald, William Wordsworth, Euripides, Joseph Blanco White, Edmund Clarence Stedman, G.W. Pettee, Robert Tannahill, Ebenezer Jones, John Chalkhill, Abraham Cowley, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Russell Lowell, Andrew Marvell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lisle Bowles, Leanne Yau, Charles Harpur, Sonia, Edith M. Thomas, Charles Kingsley, Lord Byron, Ebenezer Elliott, Benjamin Franklin Taylor, Richard Henry Horne, Jason in Panama, Walter Scott, Hartley Coleridge, Duncan Campbell Scott, Alfred Tennyson, John Davies, Aristophanes, Charles G. Eastman, Elizabeth Roberts MacDonald, William Browne, Robert Burns, Samuel Rogers, Ludwig H.C. Hölty, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Celia Laighton Thaxter
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