Creamware — the refined, cream-coloured earthenware perfected by Wedgwood and adopted across Europe — appears in poems about the democratisation of the table: affordable elegance for the rising middle class; Wedgwood called his creamware "Queensware" after Queen Charlotte's patronage — a name that gave ordinary pottery a royal dimension, suitable for poems about aspiration; A poem about an eighteenth-century kitchen might describe creamware's clean lines as a kind of prose after the ornate poetry of earlier delftware: "plain, pale, and honest — the new taste, the new century"; In a poem about manufacture, creamware's success stands for the power of good design meeting industrial production: "he made the beautiful affordable, and the table was never the same"; Creamware's neutral colour — warm rather than stark — gives it a domestic humanity that white porcelain lacks, and poets of the everyday might prefer it for that reason; A poem about an archaeological dig might turn a creamware shard: "no painter's marks, no factory stamp — just the pale body, the simple glaze, and the fact of having been used."