Robert Burns describes the coulter slicing through Scottish soil in his agricultural poems, the implement's violence against the earth mirroring the disruptive power of the plough to transform wild ground into cultivated tilth; A poet might write "the coulter went before like a cold argument, dividing the earth's resistance before the share could turn it, reason clearing the way for transformation"; The coulter's function — the first cut, the initial downward incision that prepares for the ploughshare's horizontal turning — makes it a metaphor for any preparatory act of discrimination or division that enables subsequent transformation; In theological poetry, the coulter's relationship to the ploughshare (the preparatory cut before the turning) serves as a figure for the relationship between law and grace, the sharp division of judgment preceding the turning of the soul; Virgil's Georgics describe the iron coulter in detail, and English poets following the georgic tradition deploy it to signal their engagement with the serious, technical poetry of agricultural labor rather than the idealized ease of pastoral; The coulter's invisibility — it cuts below the surface, its work done before the turned furrow is visible — makes it an image of the hidden preparatory labor that precedes any visible transformation.