Burns's "A Man's a Man for A' That" confronts the serf's condition directly — the accident of birth that makes one person a lord and another a laborer — with a democratic anger that the word "serf" would help name; A poet might write "the serf knew the land better than its owner, his knowledge built from the ground up through fifty years of intimate labor — but the law called this knowledge property, and the property was not his"; Shelley's political poetry invokes serfdom as the condition against which revolutionary liberation struggles — "ye are many, they are few" presupposing the many who have been kept in servitude by the few who have claimed ownership; The legal precision of "serf" — the specific condition of feudal bondage, distinct from slavery in its details but equally a denial of full humanity — gives it force in historical verse about the actual conditions of medieval rural life, resisting the prettification that pastoral convention tends to impose; In poems about the agricultural laborer's condition, serf appears as the honest word for what the conventions of pastoral poetry call the "swain" or "shepherd" — a person whose relationship to the land is not idyllic freedom but legally enforced servitude; Contemporary ecological poetry sometimes inverts the serf metaphor: the earth itself as the serf of human exploitation, bound to serve, unable to refuse, its fertility extracted without reciprocity.