Ruth in the Book of Ruth is the defining literary gleaner — the foreign widow who follows the reapers in Boaz's field, gathering the grain left behind by the main harvest, her modesty and industry rewarded by Boaz's protective generosity; Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" transforms the gleaner into one of English poetry's most affecting images: "the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home / She stood in tears amid the alien corn"; A poet might write "the gleaner moved along the stubble rows after the main harvest had passed, her gathering hands finding what abundance overlooked, turning remainder into sufficiency"; In contemporary poetry about migrant labor, the gleaner becomes a figure for the person who sustains themselves on what the dominant economy discards — the gig worker, the scrap collector, the person who lives in the margins of the primary economy; Keats's personification of autumn as a gleaner — "thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind" — elevates the humble practice into a figure for the season's patient, all-gathering work, the final collection of what the year has produced; The gleaner's relationship to the main harvest — following after, dependent on the leavings, excluded from the primary act of reaping — makes gleaner a figure for any marginal relationship to abundance: the secondary reader, the late scholar, the poet working with received materials.