Garden Poems with Wings: Grasshoppers, Crickets, and the Summer Mosquito

July 15, 2020

Today’s poetry pays tribute to some of the tiniest musicians of summer—the insects whose presence hums in every warm, lazy hour.

Their sounds, though small, knit together the season’s atmosphere: the steady buzz in the grass, the whirr of wings at dusk, the endless vibrant murmur of life everywhere.

To poets, insects have always been symbols of endurance, persistence, and the unending poetry of nature itself.

John Keats, ever the Romantic naturalist, captured this perfectly in his sonnet “On the Grasshopper and Cricket.”

Written during a bleak English winter, it praises the insects who keep nature’s song alive from one season to the next:

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.
— John Keats, English Romantic poet, On the Grasshopper and Cricket

In Keats’s hands, the grasshopper and the cricket share a single voice—the unbroken continuity of nature’s music. Even in the depths of winter, when the fields lie hushed, the cricket continues the song the grasshopper began. To Keats, the poetry of earth never falls silent; it merely shifts its key.

Niels Mogens Boedecker offers a more playful but equally vivid glimpse of insect life. His short poem “Midsummer Night Itch” celebrates that familiar figure of summer evenings: the mosquito—a less beloved but inescapable presence.

Mosquito is out,
it's the end of the day;
she's humming and hunting
her evening away.
Who knows why such hunger
arrives on such wings
at sundown? I guess
it's the nature of things.
— Niels Mogens Boedecker, Danish-American author and illustrator, Midsummer Night Itch

Boedecker’s humor softens what every gardener knows to be true: with summer’s beauty comes its bite.

Unlike Keats’s graceful harmonies, his mosquito hums a different tune—an insistent one, perfectly in tune with July’s restless air. Yet even here, he finds poetry. It is, as he says, the nature of things.

Both poems remind us that summer’s symphony is played not only by birds and breezes but by the smallest of creatures.

The grasshopper’s fiddle, the cricket’s hearthside trill, even the mosquito’s droning note—all belong to the same grand composition.

To hear them is to be reminded that life—warming, buzzing, unending—is most present when it seems smallest.