Poetry · Chapter
On the Grasshopper and Cricket explained
The poem celebrates the enduring poetry of nature, contrasting the grasshopper's summer song with the cricket's winter chirp, asserting that the music of the earth never ceases.
What happens
The poem celebrates the enduring poetry of nature, contrasting the grasshopper's summer song with the cricket's winter chirp, asserting that the music of the earth never ceases.
Themes in this chapter
Nature and Imagination
The poem personifies the grasshopper and cricket as voices of nature's eternal poetry, linking natural cycles to imaginative continuity.
Beauty and Transience
Contrasts the fleeting summer and winter seasons while asserting the permanent beauty of earth's song.
Characters to notice
- Unknown
The speaker observes and reflects on the persistent song of the grasshopper in summer and the cricket in winter.
Key passages
“The poetry of earth is never dead”
Nature's beauty and music are eternal, never ceasing.
Opening line establishes the central theme of nature's perpetual vitality.
“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”
In the heat of summer when birds are silent, the grasshopper's chirp fills the fields.
Describes the grasshopper as the voice of summer, taking over when other creatures rest.
“On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket’s song”
In the quiet of a frosty winter night, the cricket sings from near the stove.
Shifts to winter, showing the cricket as the counterpart to the grasshopper.
“And seems to one, in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.”
To a drowsy listener, the cricket's song sounds like the grasshopper's summer chirp.
Bridges the seasons, suggesting the continuity of nature's music in the mind's ear.