“On the Grasshopper and cricket” is a fine sonnet of Keats. It is a Petrarchan sonnet. It has an interesting story about its origin. On December 30th, 1816, Keats and his friend Clarke went out to Hampstead to spend an evening with Leigh Hunt.
In course of their discussion, when their talk turned on crickets, Hunt proposed to Keats the challenge of writing then and there, a sonnet on the Grasshopper and the cricket. This sonnet was an immediate product of that challenge.
Here he expresses his conviction that poetry is somehow directly created in the poet’s soul by nature. Nature and poetry is one and the same thing. Every object of nature like a bird, a grasshopper, a cricket, a flower etc. inspires the poet to create poetry.
Keats’s own poetry asserts this truth. Writing poetry offers him a form of escape from the realities of life. He imaginatively pictures the mystery of man’s association with nature. In Keats’s mind nature and poetry are identical. Therefore, to him the poetry of earth is never dead.
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Keats’s senses were keenly alive to the beauty of natural phenomena. In all the lines of the sonnet, he shows than, whatever the season, something is always going on in the physical world which appeals to the imagination and senses.