Wouldn't it be nice to have a drink at Manoa Gardens with Shakespeare, Keats, and Mary Shelley?

Songs 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
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,
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?

Lines on the Mermaid Tavern, 1818[1]



Struggling to make a living through his passion, John Keats never forgot the influences of the past. From the medieval writers to Shakespeare to Spenser to his own contemporaries like Wordsworth and Shelley, Keats’ influences threaded their way through his writing.

“To the Romantics, the stories of days gone by were vastly preferable to the uninspiring intellect of the neoclassical age in which they were living,” (Egendorf, 14).

The spiral turns again. Writers of today look at the medieval writers (Bede or the troubadours), Shakespeare, Spenser and his fairy queen, on to Keats and the other Romantic poets, and then to later writers—C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Neil Gaiman (who wrote his own Sandman version of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream) and Charles de Lint. Every writer whose work we read bears an imprint on our writing, whether we know it or not.



[1] From “Representative Poetry Online.” Viewed May 4, 2008.