On the Grasshopper and the Cricket

Nature with all it's glorious sights and sounds is as beautiful as poetry. Discuss how Keats conveys this idea through his poem.

John Keats wrote the poem, 'On The Grasshopper and The Cricket'. This poem was written as a means to describe the eternal beauty of nature. He is showing the cyclical process of nature-winter and summer. He is also trying to emphasize on the inevitable end of nature and how his role as a poet is to immortalize this beauty, to make sure it lives on in literature.
"The poetry of earth is never dead"- meaning true beauty never dies. The metaphor is used to show that the sights and sounds of nature are as sublime as poetry. Already, Keats is conveying his idea of the glory of nature and poetry. "when all the birds are faint with the hot sun," this image is used to show summer. "And hide in the cooling trees, a voice will run; From hedge to hedge about new- mown mead", here Keats introduces the grasshopper, as a creature of summer, and the disembodied sound of it moving from hedge to hedge. "In summer luxury,- he has never done", as all things in summer, the grasshopper has an insatiable appetite for fun and merrymaking, and when he is tired, he goes and rests in the shade. Again, showing the two sides of nature-the heat, which is full of energy and the shade, a place of relaxation.
The first eight lines is the octave. This is where Keats states the idea of the immortalization of nature through poetry. These lines are all about the season of summer. The grasshopper is used as a symbol of summer. The disembodied sound he makes encompasses the whole mood of the summer heat.
"The poetry of Earth is ceasing never:" this is an echo of the the first line, written, to bring us back to the reality of how all beautiful things are doomed for destruction, but the poet, Keats, is saving the beauty from such destruction by writing this poem using sensory words and themes and melody. "On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence,...