Home › Glossary › Letter T

tillage

Archaic Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The preparation of land for growing crops by ploughing, harrowing, and otherwise working the soil; cultivated land itself.

Detailed Definition
Tillage derives from Old English "tilian" (to strive, to cultivate) and describes both the process of preparing land for cultivation and the land that has been so prepared. It is more comprehensive than any single operation—encompassing ploughing, harrowing, fertilizing, and all the other activities that convert raw ground into fertile tilth. In poetry tillage represents the entire project of agricultural civilization: the human transformation of wild land into productive garden. It appears in georgic verse that celebrates the science and art of farming, following Virgil's Georgics in treating agriculture as a noble subject worthy of serious poetic attention. The word also carries its moral metaphor: the tillage of the soul, the cultivation of virtue through effortful practice and patient attention to spiritual growth.
Example
Example in poetry:
Tillage as the foundational act of agricultural civilization — the transformation of wild land into productive field through ploughing, harrowing, and cultivation — appears in poetry as the original creative act, the beginning from which all subsequent abundance flows; A poet might write "the tillage of his mind was never finished — each season requiring the same effort, the same turning under of what had grown and hardened, the same preparation for new seed"; Virgil's Georgics are organized around the theme of tillage — the careful, intelligent management of agricultural land as the basis of Roman civilization and the subject worthy of the highest poetic art; In theological poetry the soul's tillage — the cultivation of spiritual virtue through effort and discipline — provides an extended metaphor for the spiritual life as an agricultural project requiring constant labor and intelligent management; The biblical injunction to "break up your fallow ground" (Hosea) connects tillage to spiritual renewal: the uncultivated heart must be broken open before it can receive the seed of grace; In political verse about the rights of those who work the land, tillage appears as the evidence of labor's claim — the tilled field as proof that the farmer has invested himself in the land, that the earth he cultivates has a claim on his loyalty that transcends legal ownership.
Additional Notes
Tillage is one of the terms that allows students to understand the relationship between the pastoral and georgic traditions in English poetry most clearly. The pastoral tradition, as Empson and others have defined it, tends toward the idealization of rural life, emphasizing rest, beauty, and natural abundance. The georgic tradition, following Virgil's Georgics, celebrates labor — specifically the demanding, skilled, seasonal labor of cultivating the earth. Tillage belongs unambiguously to the georgic tradition: it is the name for the entire practice of preparing land for cultivation, encompassing all the difficult operations of ploughing, harrowing, and improving the soil. Students should read the opening of Virgil's Georgics (Book I) alongside English poems that use tillage to understand the inherited framework of ideas about labor, cultivation, and civilization that the word invokes. The connection between physical tillage and spiritual cultivation — the soul as a field that must be prepared, broken up, and made receptive before it can receive the seed of grace — runs through Christian homiletics and religious poetry from the medieval period to the present. Students should trace this metaphor's development from its agricultural origin through its theological application. Related terms: tilth, furrow, fallow, harrow, ploughshare.
Other Meanings of “tillage”
Also Known As
tilth cultivation husbandry ploughland
Skip to main content