The granary as the agricultural community's ultimate security — the building that makes civilization possible by carrying surplus across the hungry gap between harvests — appears in poetry as a symbol of both abundance and the anxiety that depends on abundance; Virgil's Georgics include the granary among the essential structures of the well-managed farm, its maintenance and management as worthy of careful attention as the cultivation of the fields that fill it; A poet might write "the granary stood full at Michaelmas, and the farmer walked through it in the dark with his hands, measuring the year's success in the coolness of stored grain"; In apocalyptic poetry — the granary burned by enemies, destroyed by flood, emptied by famine — the loss of stored grain represents civilizational catastrophe, the disruption of the continuity between one harvest and the next; By extension, granary applies to entire regions: Egypt was Rome's granary, the American Midwest is the modern world's — and this geopolitical sense allows poets to think about power, dependency, and the vulnerability of civilizations that depend on distant food supplies; The granary as metaphor for memory — the mind's storehouse of images and experiences laid up against future need — appears in poems about creativity and the relationship between lived experience and poetic composition.