‘The poetry of earth is never dead’: Meteorology and Myth in Keats’s Grasshopper Sonnet

Abstract

Keats’s 1816 competition sonnet ‘On the Grasshopper and Cricket’ is easily dismissed as juvenilia, but when read with an eye to his interest in Greek mythology, the poem rewards further attention. In particular, the myth of Tithonus, who gained eternal life without eternal youth and was transformed into either a grasshopper or cricket, situates Keats’s immortal ‘poetry of earth’ in an ambivalent context that, in turn, makes sense of otherwise curiously neutral language. This ambivalent framing also encourages a new reading of the poem as a product of 1816, ‘the year without a summer’, building a case for the sonnet as an example of what Nikki Hessell has called Keats’s ‘botany of absence’ in the 1817 Poems volume more broadly.