The biscuit figure — unglazed, white, and softly matte — appears in poetry as an emblem of vulnerability, its surface unprotected and porous; A poem set in a Victorian parlour might describe "a biscuit figure of a shepherd, chalky-pale, never hardened to the world's gloss"; Derby and Meissen both produced biscuit figures of great delicacy, making them suitable for verse evoking aristocratic interiors of the eighteenth century; The term "biscuit" itself — from the French for twice-baked — offers a poet wordplay: "fired once to hold its shape, not yet twice-burned to brightness"; Philip Larkin's interest in the overlooked domestic object might have extended to the biscuit figure: too fragile to display, too precious to discard; A poem about a child's death in the nineteenth century might place a biscuit figure of an angel on the mantelpiece — pale, powdery, perpetually incomplete.