The Grim Reaper's sickle — the crescent blade that cuts down human lives as the farmer's sickle cuts grain — is the most pervasive metaphor derived from this agricultural tool, connecting the harvest of food to the harvest of lives; Keats's "To Autumn" implies the sickle through its imagery of reaping and gleaning — the cutting has been done, the season's work accomplished with the blade that is the harvest's primary instrument; A poet might write "the sickle went through the standing barley with a sound like tearing paper, each stroke a brief violence that cleared a small arc of abundance and left the bare stubble behind"; The crescent shape of the sickle — its blade curved like the new moon — connects it to lunar cycles and feminine mythology: the sickle as the moon goddess's instrument, the harvest as a lunar as well as solar event; In political poetry the sickle appears as the communist movement's emblem, the agricultural worker's tool paired with the industrial worker's hammer — but beneath the ideological deployment lies the actual agricultural implement and its history of use by generations of harvesters; Burns, who harvested his own fields, describes the sickle with the respect of a man who has used it, his attention to the quality of the blade and the technique of its use distinguishing his agricultural verse from the pastoral poetry of those who observed farming from a comfortable distance.