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 runFrom hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the grasshopper"s-he takes the leadIn 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
Those pleasures are not pleasures that trouble the quiet and tranquillity of thy life.
Jeremy Taylor
Author.-John Keats (1795-1821), an English poet trained as a surgeon. Among his longer poems are Endymion, Lamia, Hyperion, and The Eve of St. Agnes, but his chief fame lies in such shorter poems as La Belle Dame sans Merci, Ode to a Grecian Urn, and his sonnets.
General.-Here is a sonnet. What is a sonnet? How do the rhymes go? Which is the summer insect and which the winter one? What is your own idea of the "poetry of earth "? What creatures or things reveal it to you most fully?