The biblical account of Moses hidden among the bulrushes at the Nile's edge gives the plant its most resonant literary appearance — the tall aquatic stems as the protecting wilderness that conceals vulnerable life from the power of empire; Keats's sedge-and-bulrush landscapes create marginal, waterside atmospheres where ordinary life seems suspended and enchantment becomes possible — the wet margins between land and water as a threshold space; A poet might write "the bulrush stood its patient watch at the water's edge, brown-headed and unreading, the marsh's tall sentinel"; Gerard Manley Hopkins's eye for the specific forms of natural things would naturally attend to the bulrush's distinctive cylindrical flower head, the compressed, velvety brown spike that distinguishes it from all other waterside plants; In elegies for wetland landscapes drained and converted to agriculture, the loss of bulrush stands for the loss of an entire ecosystem — the tall, rustling margins where birds nested and water lapped at the roots of the reed-bed; The bulrush's ability to colonize disturbed ground at water's edge, to establish itself in the difficult interface between land and water, makes it an image of resilience and adaptive survival in inhospitable margins.