Marvell's "The Mower" poems make the mowing action central to their erotic and elegiac meaning — the mower who cuts the grass becomes the figure for desire's destructive power, the beautiful field destroyed by the very force that loves it; In Keats's "To Autumn" the act of mowing is past before the poem begins, the mown landscape implicit in the stubble and the gleaned field — the cutting that has already happened creating the conditions for the poem's meditation; A poet might write "he mowed the long grass at the orchard's edge, the scythe's whisper the sound of summer editing itself, reducing the year's excess to the clean possibility of aftermath"; The mow as noun — the place in the barn where hay is stored — provides a domestic, interior counterpart to the field operation, the cut grass preserved in the darkness of the barn as the meadow's harvest is preserved against winter need; Shakespeare's "Full many a glorious morning have I seen" implicitly invokes the mower's action in its description of the sun's rays cut short by cloud — the light mowed down by weather as the mower cuts the standing grass; The scythe as the mower's instrument connects the agricultural action to the Grim Reaper's harvesting of human lives, making every mowing poem potentially an elegy.