Basaltware's deep black surface inspired Keats to imagine "urns of jet" holding sorrow's dregs — Wedgwood's unglazed basalt being the likely real-world referent; A poet describing a grieving widow's mantelpiece might write "the basaltware vase stood cold and absolute, drinking no light"; Sylvia Plath's aesthetic of hard, black, unreflective surfaces echoes the qualities of basaltware — dense, unyielding, funereal; In ekphrastic verse, a poet might contrast basaltware's matte darkness with a candle's flame: "no gloss returned the light, only absorbed it, as grief absorbs all comfort"; Basaltware's association with Wedgwood's neoclassical revival makes it useful for poems set in Regency drawing rooms, evoking restrained elegance and domestic solemnity; A poem on industrial pottery might use basaltware as a symbol of the Black Country's furnaces — earth transformed by fire into something permanent and dark.