A week or so ago, I posted an entry about the Corpus Christi clock in Cambridge, a beautiful, strange contraption with no hands and a large, scary grasshopper that “eats” time as it walks along the top of the clock’s face. I included a little picture in my entry, but now I have something even better: video!

Neat, huh? And I like that inventor. I kind of want to adopt him as a grandfather.

This focus on grasshoppers reminds me of one of my favorite Renaissance poems: “The Grasshopper,” by Lovelace. It refers to the fable of the ant and the grasshopper—you know, the one where the grasshopper sings and plays all summer, while the hardworking ant stores food for the winter. And what happens when the winter comes? Well, when I was a kid, the version I read said that the grasshopper got cold and hungry, and begged the ant for some food. The kind ant invited him inside his hill, and they were warm and cozy. But, um, I think that in the original version, the ant says, “Too bad for you, grasshopper! Go eat snow!” and the poor, silly grasshopper freezes to death. I like the version I read as a child much better. Fables always teach a lesson, and I think the lesson of mercy is more important than the message “You play, you pay.”

Here are the lines I like best from “The Grasshopper”:

Poor verdant fool! and now green ice!—thy joys,
Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass,
Bid us lay in ‘gainst winter rain, and poise
Their floods with an o’erflowing glass.

p.s. Somewhere in all of this there must be some connection to the Wall Street crisis and the $700 billion dollar bailout package Congress just refused to pass…

p.p.s. Of course, Lovelace wasn’t really writing about an ant and a grasshopper. He was writing about the English Civil War and tensions between the Puritans (ants) and the Royalists (grasshoppers).