Poem by John Keats

On the Grasshopper and Cricket

    Sonnet

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	        
  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.

1. On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt
2. Bards of Passion and of Mirth
3. Specimen of Induction to a Poem
4. Calidore
5. To (“Hadst Thou Liv’d in Days of Old…”)

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