Gleaning as a poetic practice — gathering images, phrases, and perceptions left behind by experience — connects the poet's work to one of the humblest agricultural practices, suggesting that poetry arises from patient attention to what others overlook; The legal right of gleaning — established in biblical law as a duty owed by landowners to the poor — was gradually restricted and finally abolished in England during the enclosure period, and poems about gleaning can carry this history of contested access; A poet might write "what is lyric poetry if not gleaning — the late walk through the stubble field of lived experience, gathering what the main harvest of prose and narrative has left behind"; The Agnes Varda documentary "The Gleaners and I" (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse) connects traditional agricultural gleaning to contemporary urban scavenging and artistic appropriation, a connection that poets exploring waste, reuse, and found materials have found productive; In elegies the gleaning metaphor suggests the poet's work of recovering meaning from the scattered remnants of a life — the few images and phrases that remain after loss has taken the substance, gathered into the small basket of the poem; The seasonal timing of gleaning — after the main harvest, before the plough returns — places it in the transitional moment between abundance and its end, a position that elegiac poetry consistently occupies.