The threshing floor in the Old Testament — the place where grain is beaten to separate it from its husks — is the setting for Boaz's meeting with Ruth, the central scene of the Book of Ruth's pastoral narrative; Piers Plowman uses the threshing floor as a theological image — the separation of grain from chaff as a figure for divine judgment, the righteous distinguished from the wicked by the same violent, rhythmic action that separates edible grain from useless husk; A poet might write "they threshed through September with the old flail, the rhythm of it filling the barn like a heartbeat, the chaff rising in gold clouds toward the light that fell through the door"; The mechanical threshing machine — the steam-powered "threshing machine" that replaced the hand-flail and generated intense social conflict in the early nineteenth century — appears in Hardy's work as a symbol of the industrialization of agriculture, the ancient rhythmic labor replaced by the impersonal violence of the machine; In creative work, thresh serves as a metaphor for the process of composition — the beating away of what is inessential, the violent separation of the poem's grain from the husk of first drafts and abandoned approaches; The dust and noise of threshing — the chaff filling the air, the rhythmic beat of the flail, the smell of grain and straw broken open — provide one of pastoral poetry's most vivid sensory images, the harvest's violence made audible and tangible.