Mermaid Tavern - Mermaid Tavern in Literature

Mermaid Tavern in Literature

Jonson and Beaumont both mentioned the tavern in their verse. Jonson's Inviting a Friend to Supper refers to "A pure cup of rich Canary wine, / Which is the Mermaid's now, but shall be mine". Beaumont, in his verse letter to Jonson, describes "things we have seen done / At the Mermaid", including,

...words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came,
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest.

Two hundred years later, in early February 1819, John Keats composed a poem on the legend initiated by Beaumont, Lines on the Mermaid Tavern—26 lines of verse that open and close with the following couplets:

Souls of poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?

Keats' precedent was followed by Theodore Watts-Dunton in his poem Wassail Chorus at the Mermaid Tavern, a Christmas drinking-song imagined to have been sung in the tavern, in which each new verse is "composed" by one of the poet-guests, including Raleigh, Drayton, "Shakespeare's friend", Heywood and Jonson.

In his 1908 Prophets, Priests and Kings (p. 323), A. G. Gardiner turned to these "intellectual revels" at the Mermaid Tavern to express the independent genius of his friend G. K. Chesterton:

Time and place are accidents: he is elemental and primitive. He is not of our time, but of all times. One imagines him wrestling with the giant Skrymir and drinking deep draughts from the horn of Thor, or exchanging jests with Falstaff at the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, or joining in the intellectual revels at the Mermaid Tavern, or meeting Johnson foot to foot and dealing blow for mighty blow. With Rabelais he rioted, and Don Quixote and Sancho were his "vera brithers." One seems to see him coming down from the twilight of fable, through the centuries, calling wherever there is good company, and welcome wherever he calls, for he brings no cult of the time or pedantry of the schools with him.

In 1913 the ballad poet Alfred Noyes published Tales of the Mermaid Tavern, a long poem in a series of chapters, each dedicated to Elizabethan writers associated with the tavern. These include Jonson, Shakespeare and Marlowe.

Canadian poets William Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott together wrote a literary column called "At the Mermaid Inn" for the Toronto Globe from February 1892 until July 1893.

In Canadian folksinger Joni Mitchell's 1971 song, "Carey," about her sojourn on Crete in 1970, the speaker encourages Carey: "Let's go down to the Mermaid Cafe, and I will buy you a bottle of wine."