Read "The Grasshopper" by Madison Cawein online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
What joy you take in making hotness hotter, / In emphasizing dullness with your buzz, / Making monotony more monotonous! / When Summer comes, and drouth hath dried the water / In all the creeks, we hear your ragged rasp / Filing the stillness. Or, -- as urchins beat / A stagnant pond whereon the bubbles gasp, -- / Your switch-like music whips the midday heat. / O bur of sound caught in the Summer's hair, / We hear you everywhere!
We hear you in the vines and berry-brambles, / Along the unkempt lanes, among the weeds, / Amid the shadeless meadows, gray with seeds, / And by the wood 'round which the rail-fence rambles, / Sawing the sunlight with your sultry saw. / Or, -- like to tomboy truants, at their play / With noisy mirth among the barn's deep straw, -- / You sing away the careless summer-day. / O brier-like voice that clings in idleness / To Summer's drowsy dress!
You tramp of insects, vagrant and unheeding, / Improvident, who of the summer make / One long green mealtime, and for winter take / No care, aye singing or just merely feeding! / Happy-go-lucky vagabond, -- 'though frost / Shall pierce, ere long, your green coat or your brown, / And pinch your body, -- let no song be lost, / But as you lived into your grave go down -- / Like some small poet with his little rhyme, / Forgotten of all time.