Gedicht (Poem)

On the Grasshopper and Cricket (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.

December 30, 1816.

Poems (1817)

There is a lovely story about this poem.

Firstly- It is a sonnet ie. a poem of 14 lines, with Iambic rhythm (de-dah, de-dah, de-dah) and 5 stressed syllables to every line. The other requiremnt of a sonnet is that there should be a change of thought or and expanding of ideas in the last six lines. Usually every line rhymes with at least one other; the rhyming pattern varies FROM sonnet to sonnet.

John Keats and his dear friend Leigh Hunt (there is a poem about him in this Keats collection) discussed the difference between the grasshopper and the cricket and challenged each other to write a sonnet, to be judged by some literary friends. The young Keats won the competition, but he always humbly said that he preferred Hunt\'s sonnet to his own.

Keat\'s line \"The poetry of earth is ceasing never\" goes down with \"A thing of beauty is a joy forever\" as one of Keat\'s most quotable quotes. (They sound as if they come FROM the same poem .... but No....

Een sonnet telt veertien regels, onderverdeeld in acht en zes. Meestal vallen die eerste acht regels (het octaaf) uiteen in twee kwatrijnen en de laatste zes (het sextet) in twee strofen van drie regels (terzinen). Tussen de eerste acht en de laatste zes regels ligt een wending in de tekst. Die kan bestaan uit een tegenstelling, een verbijzondering van het algemene, een becommentariëring van het voorafgaande, kortom: er is veel mogelijk, zolang er maar een wending ontstaat die een spanning oproept tussen octaaf en sextet.

Het oorspronkelijk rijmschema is abab abab cdc dcd. Het klassieke sonnet heeft een maximum van vijf (liever nog: vier) verschillende klankrijmen.

John Keats (1795-1821), English lyric poet, usually regarded as the archetype of the Romantic writer. Keats felt that the deepest meaning of life lay in the apprehension of material beauty, although his mature poems reveal his fascination with a world of death and decay.

Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795 as the son of a livery-stable manager. He was the oldest of four children, who remained deeply devoted to each other. After their father died in 1804, Keats\'s mother remarried but the marriage was soon broken. She moved with the children, John and his sister Fanny and brothers George and Tom, to live with her mother at Edmonton, near London. She died of tuberculosis in 1810.

At school Keats read widely. He was educated at Clarke\'s School in Enfield, where he began a translation of the Aeneid. In1811 he was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary. His first poem, \"Lines in Imitation of Spenser\", was written in 1814. In that year he moved to London and resumed his surgical studies in 1815 as a student at Guy\'s hospital. Next year he became a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. Before devoting himself entirely to poetry, Keats worked as a dresser and junior house surgeon. In London he had met the editor of The Examiner, Leigh Hunt, who introduced him to other young Romantics, including Shelley. His poem, \"O Solitude\", also appeared in The Examiner.

Keats\'s first book, Poems, was published in 1817. It was about this time Keats started to use his letters as the vehicle of his thoughts of poetry. \"Endymion\", Keats\'s first long poem appeared, when he was 21. Keats\'s greatest works were written in the late 1810s, among them \"Lamia\", \"The Eve of St. Agnes\", the great odes including \"Ode to a Nightingale\", Ode To Autumn\" and \"Ode on a Grecian Urn\". He worked briefly as a theatrical critic for The Champion.

Keats spent three months in 1818 attending his brother Tom, who was seriously ill with tuberculosis. After Tom\'s death in December, Keats moved to Hampstead. In the winter of 1818-19 he worked mainly on \"Hyperion\".

In 1820 the second volume of Keats poems appeared and gained critical success. However, Keats was suffering from tuberculosis and his poems were marked with sadness partly because he was too poor to marry Fanny Brawne, the woman he loved.

Declining Shelley\'s invitation to join him at Pisa, Keats went to Rome, where he died at the age of 25, on February 23, 1821. Keats told his friend Joseph Severn that he wanted on his grave just the line, \"Here lies one whose name was writ in water.\"