THE GRASSHOPPER

  O Thou that swing’st upon the waving ear
    Of some well-filled oaten beard,
  Drunk every night with a delicious tear
    Dropt thee from heaven, where now th’art rear’d!

  The joys of earth and air are thine entire,
    That with thy feet and wings dost hop and fly;
  And when thy poppy works, thou dost retire
    To thy carved acorn-bed to lie.

  Up with the day, the Sun thou welcom’st then,
    Sport’st in the gilt plaits of his beams,
  And all these merry days mak’st merry men
    Thyself, and melancholy streams.

A little artificial, this poem written at least two hundred and fifty years ago; but it is pretty in spite of its artifice.  Some of the conceits are so quaint that they must be explained.  By the term “oaten beard,” the poet means an ear of oats; and you know that the grain of this plant is furnished with very long hair, so that many poets have spoken of the bearded oats.  You may remember in this connection Tennyson’s phrase “the bearded barley” in the “Lady of Shalott,” and Longfellow’s term “bearded grain” in his famous poem about the Reaper Death.  When a person’s beard is very thick, we say in England to-day “a full beard,” but in the time of Shakespeare they used to say “a well filled beard”—­hence the phrase in the second line of the first stanza.

In the third line the term “delicious tear” means dew,—­which the Greeks called the tears of the night, and sometimes the tears of the dawn; and the phrase “drunk with dew” is quite Greek—­so we may suspect that the author of this poem had been reading the Greek Anthology.  In the third line of the second stanza the word “poppy” is used for sleep—­a very common simile in Elizabethan times, because from the poppy flower was extracted the opiate which enables sick persons to sleep.  The Greek authors spoke of poppy sleep.  “And when thy poppy works,” means, when the essence of sleep begins to operate upon you, or more simply, when you sleep.  Perhaps the phrase about the “carved acorn-bed” may puzzle you; it is borrowed from the fairy-lore of Shakespeare’s time, when fairies were said to sleep in little beds carved out of acorn shells; the simile is used only by way of calling the insect a fairy creature.  In the second line of the third stanza you may notice the curious expression about the “gilt plaits” of the sun’s beams.  It was the custom in those days, as it still is in these, for young girls to plait their long hair; and the expression “gilt plaits” only means braided or plaited golden hair.  This is perhaps a Greek conceit; for classic poets spoke of the golden hair of the Sun God as illuminating the world.  I have said that the poem is a little artificial, but I think you will find it pretty, and even the whimsical similes are “precious” in the best sense.

CHAPTER XII