POEM OF THE WEEK

I recently asked the poet Annie Freud how she became a writer. She mentioned evening workshops, but said what really mattered was where people went afterwards: “The pub, the pub, the pub! The pub is where it happened. The pub is where you spoke to your peers, where you got your formation artistique. You flirted and talked and engaged and got trashed, and trashed someone else.” For poets, she added, “The pub is so important, particularly now, when we can’t have it.”

It’s always been the way. Some pubs have become famous for the writers who staggered through their doors, such as the Eagle and Child in Oxford, where CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and their fellow “Inklings” would meet.

But the most feted might be the Mermaid Tavern, in London’s Cheapside, a rowdy Elizabethan drinking den where a group of friends styling themselves the “Right Worshipful Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen” met on the first Friday of each month. Among them were the poets

Ben Jonson and John Donne, as well as Thomas Coryat – the travel writer credited with introducing the fork to England – and John Fletcher, who filled Shakespeare’s shoes as playwright for the King’s Men after his death.

The tavern burned down in the Great Fire of London, but its fame still endured in the 19th century, when John Keats wrote this jeu d’esprit. (In an 1818 letter, he mentioned it had pleased two friends “beyond anything I ever did”.) We will hear much this year about the tragedy of Keats’s early death, 200 years ago this Tuesday. To balance that melancholy anniversary, here he is having fun; rhyming “Paradise” with “dainty pies”, and in the witty second stanza imagining a tipsy astrologer locating the pub sign among the stars – then giving the Mermaid a smack on the lips.

Tristram Fane Saunders