JA16

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.

John Keats