The caudle cup — a two-handled vessel for warm spiced gruel given to the sick or newly delivered — appears in seventeenth-century domestic poetry as an emblem of nurture and convalescence; A poem about childbirth in the early modern period might describe the caudle cup passing from hand to hand in the lying-in chamber, warm with cinnamon and ale; The cup's two handles — designed so the invalid could grip it without spilling — give poets an image of supported weakness: "she held the caudle cup in both hands as one holds a difficult truth"; Herrick's poems of domestic ceremony might naturally include a caudle cup, its contents as carefully compounded as his own verse; In a poem about nursing, the caudle cup stands for the specific, bodily care that poetry tends to overlook in favour of grand emotion; A verse elegy might describe the unused caudle cup left on the shelf after the patient does not recover — the nurture prepared too late, or not enough.