the voices of nature—­the musical sounds made by its idle life in woods and fields.  So the word “poetry” here has especially the meaning of song, and corresponds very closely to the Japanese word which signifies either poem or song, but perhaps more especially the latter.  The general meaning of the sonnet is that at no time, either in winter or in summer, is nature silent.  When the birds do not sing, the grasshoppers make music for us; and when the cold has killed or banished all other life, then the house cricket begins with its thin sweet song to make us think of the dead voices of the summer.

There is not much else of note about the grasshopper and the cricket in the works of the great English poets.  But perhaps you do not know that Tennyson in his youth took up the subject and made a long poem upon the grasshopper, but suppressed it after the edition of 1842.  He did not think it good enough to rank with his other work.  But a few months ago the poems which Tennyson suppressed in the final edition of his works have been published and carefully edited by an eminent scholar, and among these poems we find “The Grasshopper.”  I will quote some of this poem, because it is beautiful, and because the fact of its suppression will serve to show you how very exact and careful Tennyson was to preserve only the very best things that he wrote.

  Voice of the summer wind,
  Joy of the summer plain,
  Life of the summer hours,
  Carol clearly, bound along,
  No Tithon thou as poets feign
  (Shame fall ’em, they are deaf and blind),
  But an insect lithe and strong
  Bowing the seeded summer flowers. 
  Prove their falsehood and thy quarrel,
  Vaulting on thine airy feet
  Clap thy shielded sides and carol,
  Carol clearly, chirrups sweet. 
  Thou art a mailed warrior in youth and strength complete;
    Armed cap-a-pie,
    Full fair to see;
    Unknowing fear,
    Undreading loss,
    A gallant cavalier,
    Sans peur et sans reproche. 
    In sunlight and in shadow,
    The Bayard of the meadow.

The reference to Tithonus is a reference of course to a subject afterwards beautifully elaborated in another poem by Tennyson, the great poem of “Tithonus.”  The Bayard here referred to was the great French model of perfect chivalry, and is sometimes called the last of the feudal knights.  He was said to be without fear and without blame.  You may remember that he was killed by a ball from a gun—­it was soon after the use of artillery in war had been introduced; and his dying words were to the effect that he feared there was now an end of great deeds, because men had begun to fight from a distance with machines instead of fighting in the old knightly and noble way with sword and spear.  The grasshopper, covered with green plates and bearing so many little sharp spines upon its long limbs, seems to have suggested to Tennyson the idea of a fairy knight in green armour.