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Home  »  The World’s Best Poetry  »  The Grasshopper and Cricket

Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.

VI. Animate Nature

The Grasshopper and Cricket

John Keats (1795–1821)

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.