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’s 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 drinking to be lost In his own joy, to hear the chilly hills.

— On the Grasshopper and Cricket

• John Keats