John Keats

Sonnet XV. On The Grasshopper And 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 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. 'Charles Cowden Clarke records that this sonnet was written at Leigh Hunt's cottage, on a challenge from Hunt. ' Both Hunt's and Keats's sonnets 'appeared together in The Examiner for the 21st of September 1817; but Keats's volume [Poems] had already appeared in June of that year. ' ~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895.