Lines on The Mermaid Tavern

A luminous fantasy of literary communion, John Keats imagines himself and his fellow poets transported back to the Mermaid Tavern, where Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the great Elizabethan wits once gathered. Written as an invitation to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, the poem conjures the warmth and wit of that legendary company with aching tenderness. Keats yearns not merely to meet these ghosts of English poetry, but to drink in their wisdom, to hear their incomparable banter, to feel himself part of a lineage stretching backward and forward through time. It is a poem about what it means to inherit a tradition and dream of belonging to it, rendered with the lush, dreaming quality that defines Keats at his most romantic.