Cloisonné enamel — coloured glass paste fired within wire compartments on a metal base — appears in Victorian poetry as a symbol of Oriental intricacy and the patience of Eastern craft; Dante Gabriel Rossetti's densely patterned aesthetic finds an analogue in cloisonné: each cell of colour bordered, contained, and set against its neighbours; A poem about a cloisonné vase might describe the wires as the armature of a kept secret: "each colour caged in its own bright cell, never bleeding into the next"; In a poem about Japan or China, cloisonné represents the meeting of metalwork and painting — a technique that refuses to choose between structure and colour; The labour-intensive process of cloisonné — hundreds of tiny wire walls soldered by hand — suits poems about obsession and the transfiguration of patience into beauty; A contemporary poet might use a cloisonné box as a metaphor for memory: compartmentalised, brilliant, hermetically sealed.