Keats
On the Grasshopper and the Cricket
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's - he takes the lead
In summer luxury, - he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost 10
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
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Written on 30 December 1816, in competition with Leigh Hunt.
It was common habit in Hunt's circle to write sonnets on a set subject in a set time, usually fifteen minutes. If these conditions were kept, Keat's sonnet is all the more remarkable.
It only weakens at the end of the octave, where "fun" and "weed" show his difficulty in finding fourth rhymes in the pattern he had started, but it recovers triumphantly in the sestet.
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