We often ascribe personality and character traits to animals: courage to lions, wisdom to owls, cheerfulness to beavers, for example. Simon & Garfunkel’s popular 1967 song “At the Zoo” offers a clever rendering: “The monkeys stand for honesty / giraffes are insincere / and the elephants are kindly but they’re dumb…”
Seldom are insects included among the popularized animals; their simplicity and lowliness ascribes no traits to them. But their lowliness has attracted pensive poets who respect the humility of insects and derive insight from the ways of these creatures. In the West, the Romantic poet Keats is usually cited for his poem “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket,” but the impact of the poem is probably based on its eccentricity. The Japanese poet Issa is an excellent representative of the poetic subject, often citing spiders, fleas, flies, cicadas, butterflies — and crickets – especially if we make cicadas the poetic equivalent of crickets. Another poet and observer is Mary Oliver, a closer contemporary looking at the cricket (more below).
For Issa, insects, like us, are subject to birth: “First cicada. life is cruel, cruel, cruel.”
Insects eke out a life: “Don’t kill the fly — it wrings its hands, its feet.” Sometimes insects are companionable: “Daybreak — working as one, two butterflies.” Sometimes they are even exuberant: “Moment of fierceness in the first butterfly.” But we know their fate, and ours: “Autumn cicada — flat on his back, chirps his last song.” The insects teach us quietly, humbly: “Weaving butterfly, I am no more than dust.” May they remain our companions always: “When I go, guard my tomb well, grasshopper.”
Mary Oliver perceives all that Issa does in her poem “Nothing is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About,” from her 2016 book Felicity.
The cricket doesn’t wonder if there’s a heaven
or, if there is, if there’s room for him.
It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If he can, he enters a house through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.
He sings slower and slower.
Then, nothing.
This must mean something, I don’t know what.
But certainly it doesn’t mean
he hasn’t been an excellent cricket
all his life.