Hemp's dual identity — the useful industrial crop and the source of intoxication — gives it a particularly complex poetic character, the same plant serving civilization's most practical needs and its most transgressive pleasures; The hangman's hemp — the rope by which criminals were executed — gives hemp its darkest poetic presence, the fiber that grew in honest fields transformed by manufacture into the instrument of judicial death; A poet might write "the hemp grew tall and useful in the summer field, not knowing what the ropemaker would make of it, its long fibers innocent of the uses waiting at the other end of the manufacturing process"; Maritime poetry invokes hemp as the essential material of the age of sail — the sails, the rigging, the hawsers that held ships to their moorings — connecting agricultural production to naval power and the building of empires; In colonial history poems, hemp cultivation was sometimes imposed on enslaved or colonized peoples to supply naval needs, giving the crop a political charge that connects agricultural production to imperial exploitation; The current controversy over hemp and cannabis connects the pre-modern agricultural crop to contemporary debates, and poets aware of this history can use hemp to bridge the centuries, connecting the honest field crop to present-day legal and cultural conflicts.