This summary analyzes the poem "The Grasshopper and the Cricket" by John Keats. It describes how the poem depicts the grasshopper enjoying summer while the cricket provides song in winter, showing how nature's poetry is immortal through the changing seasons. The 14 line poem follows a Petrarchan sonnet structure with an octave discussing the grasshopper on a hot summer day, and a sestet shifting to a winter scene focusing on the cricket's song. Keats uses opposing images and the natural pauses of the lines to emphasize how nature's beauty survives regardless of extreme heat or cold. The summary analyzes the themes, structure, imagery and rhetorical devices used in this poem.

1. TOPIC ON
THE GRASSHOPPER
AND THE CRICKET
WRITTEN BY
JOHN KEATS

3. SREE NARAYANA TRAINING
COLLEGE, SREEKANTESWARAM,
POOCHAKKAL
B-ED 2013-14
UNIVERSITY OF KERALA

4. SUBMITTED BY
Name : MARY SHEEBA V J
Option : ENGLISH
Reg No. : 13383008 (165)

5. SUBMITTED TO
Ms. DHANYA KUMAR
ENGLISH LECTURER
SREE NARAYANA TRAINING COLLEGE,
SREEKANTESWARAM, POOCHAKKAL

6. POWERPOINT
PRESENTATION
ON
THE GRASSHOPPER AND
THE CRICKET

7. JOHN KEATS
English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four
children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats
was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother’s death, Keats’s maternal
grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as
guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell
played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School,
Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816
Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write
poetry.
Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner, who published his
sonnets “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “O Solitude.” Hunt also introduced Keats to
a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth. The
group’s influence enabled Keats to see his first volume,Poems by John Keats, published in 1817.
Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before
publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion, a four-thousand-
line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the
following year. Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, theQuarterly
Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt’s
literary circle “the Cockney school of poetry," Blackwood’s declaredEndymion to be nonsense and
recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion but recognized
Keats’s genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published. Shelley also exaggerated
the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to
a spirit broken by the negative reviews.

8. Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland, returning
home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, Keats
met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Writing some of his finest poetry between
1818 and 1819, Keats mainly worked on “Hyperion," a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek
creation myth. He stopped writing “Hyperion” upon the death of his brother, after completing only a
small portion, but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as “The Fall of Hyperion”
(unpublished until 1856). That same autumn Keats contracted tuberculosis, and by the following
February he felt that death was already upon him, referring to the present as his “posthumous
existence.”
In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry,Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.
Agnes, and Other Poems. The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of
ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also
contains the unfinished “Hyperion," and three poems considered among the finest in the English
language, “Ode on a Grecian Urn," “Ode on Melancholy," and “Ode to a Nightingale.” The book
received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances
Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote a review praising both the new book
and Endymion.
The fragment “Hyperion” was considered by Keats’s contemporaries to be his greatest achievement,
but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged.
He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear to write to
her directly—her mother, but his failing health and his literary ambitions prevented their getting
married. Under his doctor’s orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with
his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five,
and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.

10. THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET
by JOHN KEATS
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.

11. SUMMARY
The poem “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket” by John Keats,
reflects on the poet’s belief that the beauty of nature never ends. It
depicts that the two animals; the grasshopper and the cricket,
although seemingly different in many ways, are oddly similar. The
poet stresses on the immortality of poetry which is demonstrated
by two opposite seasons i.e. poetry continues to survive and lasts
forever regardless of the scorching summer and the freezing
winter. Following the iambic parameter, Keats poem is a
Petrachan sonnet which is evident through the familiar structure
and fourteen-verse arrangement. The poem is divided into an
octave and a sestet, each relating to different themes. “A voice will
run” shows that even when the world is exhausted by heat and is
drowsy with sleep, the sounds of nature never really cease. They
continue to make their impact through one thing or the other.
In this poem, a unique arrangement of the lines is to be found. In
order to place an emphasis on the theme of comparison and
contrast, the author places certain lines one after the other, e.g.
“hot sun” and “cooling trees”, “wrought a silence” and “there
shrills”, etc. All these lines with opposing images are meant to

12. on the theme that although these things are different, yet they continue to
exist along with each other. Furthermore, the poet also makes use of the
natural pauses and line endings in his poem to give more emphasis on
certain words. Also, in this way, the author I able to relate the words at
the end of the lines or at pauses with others that carry the same
meaning, e.g. “luxury” and “delights”.
As we come towards the sestet, the opening line sounds archaic and
wiser as compared to the first line of the poem. In the sestet, the subject
of the poem changes from the grasshopper to the cricket. Over here we
see another example of contrasting ideas as the grasshopper is a fun
loving, carefree creature while the cricket appears to be the more
responsible and serious of the two. Thus, if viewed figuratively, Keat is
suggesting that although the beauty of life is easily recognized in the
youth, there is also plenty of beauty in old age.
At the beginning of the sestet, the same line as the beginning of the
poem is repeated, the only difference being that it is rephrased. The echo
of the words “never” lays even more emphasis on the fact that the call of
nature is never-ending and is ever living. This emphasis is compounded
by the fact that the repeated phrase ends with the word “never”, thus
laying more emphasis onto it.
In the octave of the poem, the liveliness of the grasshopper is depicted.
Although summer is at its peak with scorching heat, the grasshopper
seems unaffected by it all, living only for the present. As the grasshopper
is fond of warmth, he uses the season to his advantage, his life filled with

13. jaunty mood of the octave. Quite on the contrary, the sestet forms the
image of winter along with its bitter cold and loneliness. Thus on the
whole, summer tends to be more poetic and cheerful, while winter is
harsher and gloomier, both on different ends, neither surviving without
the other. Thus the nature of beauty lives on.