Keats
Lines on the Mermaid Tavern
Souls of Poets dead and gone
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
Have ye tippled drink more fine
Than mine host's Canary wine?
Or are fruits of Paradise
Sweeter than those dainty pies
Of venison? O generous food!
Drest as though bold Robin Hood 10
Would, with his maid Marian,
Sup and bowse from horn and can.
I have heard that on a day
Mine host's sign-board flew away,
Nobody knew whither, till
An astrologer's old quill
To a sheepskin gave the story,
Said he saw you in your glory,
Underneath a new-old sign
Sipping beverage divine, 20
And pledging with contented smack
The Mermaid in the Zodiac.
Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
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Supposed to have been written by Keats in February 1818 at the Mermaid Tavern itself, the haunt of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and the Elizabethan poets.
Here he treats the immortality of poets humorously; later in the year he returned to the subject more seriously in the poem "Bards of Passion and of Mirth", written in the same form, which he called "a sort of rondeau" i.e. in which the last lines echo the opening.
________
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