On The Grasshopper And The Cricket

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This is an analysis I did for my poetry workshop class: The speaker of this poem is someone who appreciates the nature of poetry in its finest detail – from the voice of the grasshopper to the song of the cricket. The speaker is speaking directly to those that perhaps do not take the time to admire the poetry that nature has to offer. The reader is likely to feel favorably towards the speaker considering his or her (for the sake of the paper, I’ll use “his”) tone of admiration and the softness the poem seems to emanate. The poem itself uses lots of “soft” consonant sounds such as “poetry,” “earth,” “birds,” “voice,” “hedge,” “luxury,” and other words that force a person to kind of murmur the poem carefully when spoken aloud. The speaker continues his argument of the continuing expression of poetry by presenting the reader with a winter example and a summer example as if to say, “Rain or shine, cold or hot, poetry persists.” The title itself forces the reader to acknowledge the roles that the Grasshopper and the Cricket play in this expression of poetry. Without the title, the reader could consider the poetry itself as the star of the poem without considering the Grasshopper or the Cricket as real contributors, but merely as examples of this poetry. Keats further confirms the authority of the Grasshopper and the Cricket by capitalizing the first letter of their “names,” giving them titles and more power within the poem. There are two dominating themes of heat or warmth presented in the poem. The first is the summer itself which is captained by the Grasshopper and the second is the song of the Cricket during the cold season. The Grasshopper is presented as an appreciator of the “summer luxury” and relishes in the gift of warmth with its continuous “voice” that “run[s] from hedge to hedge.” In this case, the Grasshopper himself is capable of having his “delights”

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