Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" situates its meditation in a landscape where "the ploughman homeward plods his weary way" across the glebe — the church's own land, which connects agricultural labor to spiritual community; A poet might write "the glebe lay quiet between the church and the rectory hedge, its Latin name a reminder that the priest's living came from the same earth that fed his parishioners"; Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo" was written at a time when Hopkins was acutely aware of the natural world around him, and glebe — the consecrated earth — appears in his notes as a word connecting landscape to liturgy; The etymology of glebe (Latin "gleba," a clod of earth) connects the church's landholding to the most elemental level of the soil — the priest fed by the actual ground of his parish, an intimate material connection between spiritual and agricultural community; In historical verse about the Reformation and the dissolution of monastic estates, glebe appears as the marker of what remains — the parish church's portion of land surviving when larger ecclesiastical landholdings were seized and redistributed; The glebe as the meeting point of sacred and agricultural — the earth that belongs to the church, worked to support the cure of souls — makes it a potent symbol of the old English integration of spiritual and material life that industrialization and secularization separated.