1. Introduction

Imagine that you hear the sound of a grasshopper. What kind of picture comes to your mind along with the sound? What season is it? What time of day is it?

Now imagine that you hear the sound that a cricket makes. Is it similar to that of a grasshopper? Should you call it a song? What season are you thinking of? What time of day? Where does the sound come from?

Two poets, Leigh Hunt and John Keats, once agreed that each should write a poem about a grasshopper and a cricket. This is the one that Keats wrote. You see it is only one long stanza.

2. Reading Lesson

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 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.

3. Study

How many lines are there in the stanza? You will see that it is really divided into two parts.

What are the first eight lines about? When did the poet hear the grasshopper's song? What pleasures has the grasshopper?

What are the last six lines about?

Read the first line of each part. Express the meaning in other words. Had you ever thought of this before?

What season does the cricket's song call to the poet's mind?

The rhyme of this poem is peculiar. In the first eight lines there are but two rhymes; that is, there are only two sets of rhyming lines. Write in a column the last word of the first line and the last words of the other lines that you think are meant to rhyme with this. Put before each word the number of its line. Which word does not rhyme exactly with the others?

Write the last words of the other lines of this group in a column. Do they rhyme?

How many rhymes do you find in the last six lines? Which lines rhyme? Do you wonder that the poet made one poor rhyme in such a peculiar stanza?

Perhaps you would like to know that such a stanza is called a sonnet. Tell all you can about a sonnet.