The Poetry of Earth

The sounds of nature are all around us all the time wherever we are.  But we have to pay attention and somehow listen through the noise of our daily lives.  Hearing the music of bird songs, waterfalls, and wind through the trees on a recent trip to Kings Canyon National Park, reminded me of John Keats' poem "On the Grasshopper and the Cricket."  Evidently taking on a challenge by a fellow poet, he wrote this in an hour.  The prompt was to write a sonnet about a grasshopper and a cricket. Clearly John Keats was in tune with the sounds of nature.  Here are fourteen lines that remind us to be grateful for the music, the poetry, the gift the earth gives us everyday.

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.

 

 

Leave a comment