Keats's "To Autumn" personifies the season in one of its most celebrated guises as a winnower — "thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind," the season as the agricultural worker who lets the breeze separate grain from chaff; The biblical metaphor of God as winnower — sitting on the threshing floor with fan in hand, blowing away the wicked as chaff while preserving the righteous as grain — runs through both Testaments and structures much of the theological poetry in English; A poet might write "she winnowed experience the way her grandmother had winnowed grain — tossing it into the air repeatedly, trusting the wind to carry away what had no weight, keeping only what fell back into her hands"; The visual image of winnowing — grain tossed upward in a golden cloud, the heavy kernels falling while the chaff floats away — is one of the most dramatic and beautiful of agricultural operations, combining violence and delicacy in a single gesture; In poems about discernment, criticism, and the separation of the enduring from the ephemeral, winnowing provides the foundational metaphor — the literary critic as winnower, separating lasting work from fashionable chaff with the fan of informed judgment; The sound of winnowing — the whisper of grain through air, the lighter sound of chaff blown aside, the heavier sound of grain falling into the basket — provides an aural dimension that poets from Virgil onward have attended to with pleasure.