The console table — fixed to a wall and supported by brackets, purely ornamental — appears in poems about Georgian interiors as an object of pure display, holding a vase or a clock but serving no practical purpose; A poem about aristocratic emptiness might find its emblem in the console table: "it supported nothing but appearances, bracketed to the wall like a kept promise"; Pope's description of Hampton Court might have included a console table bearing a china jar — the decorative arts as the setting for social ritual; In a poem about a house's decline, the console table remains when the objects it once held have been sold: "bare now, its marble top still cool, its gilded brackets reaching for a weight they will not bear again"; The console table's dependence on the wall — it cannot stand alone — gives poets a metaphor for social parasitism or elegant dependency; A verse tour of a stately home might pause at the console table in the hall: the first impression, the most considered arrangement of beauty for beauty's sake.