The dibble's simplicity — a pointed stick that creates a hole for a single seed — makes it in poetry an image of the most intimate scale of agricultural work, the individual gesture that participates in the vast enterprise of feeding the world; A poet might write "she dibbled each plant in with careful violence, the sharp stick piercing the crumbled earth, her hand placing the seedling in the wound it made"; The contrast between the dibble and the plough is a contrast in scale — from the field-wide transformation of ploughing to the inch-wide hole of dibbling — that poets use to move from panoramic views of agriculture to the most intimate particular; In poems about the patience required for cultivation — whether of plants or of any other slow-growing thing — the dibble serves as an image of the single, repeated, careful action that performed thousands of times creates the ordered abundance of the kitchen garden; Clare's precise botanical and agricultural attention extends to such small implements as the dibble, his poems naming the tools of his work with the respect of a craftsman for the instruments of his craft; The dibble's association with planting — with the deliberate placing of potential life in prepared ground — makes it a natural metaphor for any act of careful initiation: the teacher placing knowledge in a prepared mind, the poet planting an image in the reader's imagination.