Bow porcelain — London's first significant soft-paste factory, established in Stratford-le-Bow — suits poems evoking mid-eighteenth-century England, its figures and wares cheaper than Meissen but aspiring to similar elegance; A poem about London's ceramic trade might place Bow alongside Chelsea and Derby in a catalogue of Georgian refinement: "Bow made its shepherdesses for merchants' wives, not duchesses, and none the worse for that"; The factory's use of bone ash — anticipating true bone china — makes Bow a transitional object for poets interested in the history of materials; In a poem about a flea market find, a Bow figure might be identified by its characteristic blue mark: "a square and dagger in underglaze, the provenance of lesser angels"; Bow porcelain's subjects — commedia dell'arte figures, birds, classical gods domesticated for the parlour — offer poets a repertoire of theatrical and mythological images; A verse meditation on London's lost industries might mourn the Bow factory's closure in 1776, its moulds and recipes dispersed like the city's other vanished crafts.