Hay preserves the nourishment of summer pasture for livestock during colder or drier months. Its cutting, turning, drying, carting, and stacking once required intense communal labour and favourable weather. In poetry, hay evokes warmth, fragrance, sunlight, rural work, and the sensuous fullness of summer. Haystacks and haylofts may suggest shelter, childhood, courtship, or secrecy, while spoiled hay signifies wasted effort. The material also connects the fleeting freshness of grass with human attempts to store time and abundance.

Hay is grass or other herbage cut and dried for animal feed; it is not the same as straw, which is the dry stalk left after grain has been removed. This distinction matters in close reading. Haymaking brings associations of summer heat, scent, communal labour, and dependence upon dry weather. Stored hay represents foresight and winter survival. Related terms include hayfield, hayloft, rick, mowing, windrow, fodder, pasture, baling, and livestock.