The Carrara marble bust — cool, white, and idealising — appears in Victorian poetry as a symbol of the classical ideal set against modern disorder; Tennyson's aesthetic, drawn to pale, still perfection, finds expression in the Carrara bust: "white as the thought before the word, and cold as that same after-silence"; A poem about a sculptor's studio might describe the dust of Carrara marble settling on everything like a fine ambition; In ekphrastic verse, the Carrara bust of a Roman emperor raises questions of power and time: the face still imperious, the empire long dissolved; The Victorian fashion for Parian ware imitations of Carrara busts — cheaper, reproducible — offers a poet a ready irony about democratic aspiration and aesthetic compromise; A poem about grief might place a Carrara bust of the beloved in the garden: "the rain finds no expression there, the frost no purchase — grief's own perfect image."