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
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's -- he takes the
In summer luxury, -- he has never
With his delights; for when tired out with
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there
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.
