Herbage as both a material reality and a legal concept gives it unusual range: the actual vegetation of a meadow — its diversity of species, its seasonal rhythms — and the customary right to graze it connect the poetic and the political; A poet might write "the herbage gave itself without asking — clover, vetch, plantain, fescue, a democracy of species that the grazing animals consumed without discrimination, each bite a lesson in equality"; Virgil's Eclogues celebrate herbage as the spontaneous gift of the pastoral landscape — the earth offering food to animals without the labor of ploughing and sowing that arable farming requires, a figure for natural abundance prior to human toil; In poems about the loss of traditional meadows to agricultural improvement — their flower-rich herbage replaced by monocultures of rye-grass — the word carries elegiac weight, naming what has been lost along with the visual and biological richness of the unimproved meadow; The legal right of herbage — the commoner's ability to graze animals on another's land by custom — connects to the broader struggle over access to the countryside that informs much English rural poetry from Clare onward; The sensory richness of herbage — its smell in summer heat, the sound of bees working through it, the visual complexity of a meadow full of different species — makes it one of pastoral poetry's most reliable repositories of natural abundance.