Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

First of all, I want to apologize for only getting you one poem last week. I was just slammed while also working an event and just was not able to get to it.

So I apologize for that. But I'm back. This week we will be announcing

the winners of our poetry contest. Those submissions all came in by last Monday, and this week we

will make the announcements of our winners. But first, let's get to today's poem, which is by

John Keats, who lived from 1795 to 1821. He was an English romantic poet and is probably most famous for works like

Ode to a Nightingale and the famous sonnet on first looking into Chapman's Homer. You've heard him

on this podcast a time or two before. The poem that I'm going to read today is, it's another good summer

poem. It's a sonnet called On the Grasshopper and the Cricket.

It goes like this.

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 moan mead.

That is the grasshoppers.

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 song, in a warmth increasing ever, and seems to one

in drowsiness half lost, the grasshoppers among some grassy hills.

I'm not exactly sure why, but for some reason, I have always felt like the sonnet was the kind of form best applied to themes related to winter and fall and cold seasons.

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