Ted Hughes's moorland poems are saturated with bracken as the defining vegetation of the upland landscapes he loved — its aggressive spread across the moor an image of nature's indifference to human agricultural ambition; A poet might write "the bracken took back the old field in a single summer, its copper fronds erasing the furrow-lines as if the plough had never passed"; The seasonal transformation of bracken — bright green in spring, full and shadowing in summer, blazing russet in autumn, collapsed and papery in winter — provides a natural calendar that moorland poets use to mark the passage of time; R.S. Thomas's Welsh hill-country poems invoke bracken alongside rock and thin soil to build a landscape of beautiful austerity, where the fern's dominance over grass signals the limits of cultivation; The carcinogenic nature of bracken, its tendency to poison cattle if overeaten, adds a subtle darkness to its beauty — the poisonous loveliness of the moor's characteristic plant; John Masefield and other poets of the English uplands use bracken's autumn color as one of the most dramatic seasonal spectacles in the British landscape, the hillside blazing as if on fire.