The Ant and the Cricket (adapted from Aesop)
Quick answer: The Ant and the Cricket summary and analysis: Aesop's fable in verse, moral, rhyme and rhythm, NCERT Class 8 Honeydew question answers and study notes.
The first poem in the NCERT Class 8 Honeydew reader is also the oldest story in the book. 'The Ant and the Cricket' retells a fable credited to Aesop, the Greek storyteller of the sixth century BCE, in bouncing English verse written by an anonymous nineteenth-century hand. A young cricket sings away the warm months, discovers in winter that his cupboard is empty, and goes begging to an ant, who sends him away with a lesson instead of a loan. Simple enough to summarise in a breath, the poem has kept schoolchildren arguing about its ending for two hundred years.
That argument is the interesting part. Is the ant sensible or cruel? Is the cricket foolish or simply made for song? The verse takes a side in its famous closing couplet about crickets with four legs and crickets with two. This guide gives you the summary, the moral, the craft of its galloping rhythm, and the question answers students need, with room left for the debate.
The story in plain words
A silly young cricket spends the whole of spring and summer singing. He lays nothing by, because the weather is warm, food is everywhere, and singing is what he loves. Then winter arrives and the world changes in a stanza: the ground turns cold and wet, there is not a crumb to be found on it, and at home his cupboard holds neither food nor drink. Starvation stares at him. Wet through and shivering, he seeks out a miserly ant, hoping for shelter and a mouthful of grain, carefully framed as a loan he promises to repay tomorrow.
The ant is unmoved. He states his kind's iron rule, that ants never borrow and never lend, then asks the question on which the fable turns: did the cricket store nothing away in the fine weather? The cricket answers that his heart was so light he sang day and night. The ant's reply is the coldest line in the poem: he who sang through summer can dance through winter. The door closes. The poet then steps outside the story for two last lines: people call this a fable, but it is true, for some crickets have four legs and some have two.
From Aesop to your textbook
The tale usually travels under the title 'The Ant and the Grasshopper' in Aesop's collections. When the French poet Jean de La Fontaine reworked it in 1668, he made the singer a cicada, and somewhere on the road into English verse the insect became a cricket. The version in Honeydew is a nineteenth-century adaptation whose author's name has not survived; it circulated in Victorian school readers long before reaching Indian classrooms. That anonymity suits it: the poem belongs to the same communal tradition as the fable, polished by use rather than owned.
Fables put animals on stage so that humans can be criticised safely, and each era quietly rewrites the verdict. Aesop ends with the improvident insect rebuked; La Fontaine, more slyly, lets his ant look mean as well as prudent and states no moral at all. The English adaptation splits the difference: the ant wins the argument, but the cheerful metre keeps our sympathy leaning toward the shivering singer, and reading the poem well means noticing that tension.
How it works: a bouncy metre with a cold ending
Say the opening lines aloud and the rhythm skips: the poem moves in a largely anapaestic metre, two light syllables then a strong one, the swing of a dance tune. That is a joke built into the form, for a poem about the dangers of singing your time away is itself irresistibly singable. Simple rhymes and a child's vocabulary carry the story from summer to winter in a handful of stanzas.
Against that cheerful tempo, the content darkens steadily: empty cupboard, wet ground, starvation, a slammed door. The contrast between bouncy sound and bleak sense is the poem's central craft effect, and it is why the ending stings. Dialogue does the heavy lifting in the middle stanzas: the cricket's wheedling politeness against the ant's clipped refusal. Then the masterstroke: the final couplet abandons the story and turns to the reader, converting a tale about insects into a warning about people.
The moral, and the argument about it
The examination-safe moral is straightforward: work hard in good times and save for the bad ones, because pleasure taken without foresight leads to suffering. The last couplet extends it, telling us that two-legged crickets, meaning improvident humans, are common enough. If a question asks for the moral in one line, that is the line to give.
But the poem leaves the ant's virtue genuinely debatable. He is called miserly, hardly a compliment, and refusing a starving neighbour a mouthful of grain sits uneasily beside any generous idea of community. Both readings earn marks if argued from the text: the poem endorses the ant's foresight while letting us feel the chill of his charity. Name the moral first and the discomfort second.
Why it lasts
Few poems survive twenty-five centuries of retelling. This one manages it because its conflict never dates: every generation contains grasshoppers and ants, spenders and savers, and every reader privately knows which one they are. The fable form keeps the lesson painless enough for eight-year-olds while the ending stays sharp enough to unsettle adults.
It also earns its place in memory through sound: the bouncing rhythm makes the poem almost self-memorising, which is why Victorian schoolmasters set it for recitation and why it still opens a national textbook. A story that installs itself in the ear has a survival advantage no argument can match.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the animal mask. Writing about a lazy friend or an ungenerous relative invites trouble; writing about a cricket and an ant invites none, and readers apply the lesson to themselves without being told to. The beast fable remains one of the safest vehicles ever invented for social criticism.
Steal the tempo trick as well: set grim content against a light, dancing metre and let the mismatch do your emotional work. And steal the final pivot from story to reader; one clean closing sentence aimed at the audience gives even a small poem the click of a shutting door.
Question answers for quick revision
Compressed answers to the questions most often set from this poem in Class 8 exams.
What poets can take from this
- Use animals as masks when your real subject is human behaviour you want to criticise safely.
- Try an anapaestic line when you want a poem to gallop; the rhythm carries narrative fast.
- Set dark events against a light metre and let the contrast create the unease.
- Give each character a distinct speaking voice inside the dialogue stanzas.
- End a story poem by turning to the reader for one closing sentence.
- Keep the vocabulary simple when the structure is doing sophisticated work.
Try it yourself
Write a modern beast fable in bouncing rhythm: two animals with opposite attitudes to money, time or attention meet at the moment one of them needs help, and your final couplet turns to the reader.
Questions
What is the moral of The Ant and the Cricket?
The moral is to work hard and save during good times so you can survive the hard ones. The closing couplet widens it to people, warning that many humans are two-legged crickets who enjoy the present and ignore the future. Thoughtful answers can add that the ant's cold refusal also raises questions about kindness.
Who wrote The Ant and the Cricket?
The verse version in the NCERT Honeydew reader is anonymous, an adaptation made in the nineteenth century. The story itself is credited to Aesop, the ancient Greek fabulist, and was famously retold in French by La Fontaine in 1668 with a cicada in place of the cricket.
What is the rhyme and rhythm of The Ant and the Cricket?
The poem moves in a largely anapaestic metre, two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one, which gives it a bouncy, songlike swing. It uses simple end rhymes in pairs and alternating patterns, making it easy to recite and remember.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.