The epergne — an elaborate table centrepiece with branching arms holding baskets, candle-holders, or glass trumpets for fruit and sweetmeats — appears in Victorian poems as an emblem of table excess; A poem about a formal dinner might describe the epergne as "a silver tree of hospitality, its branches laden with hothouse grapes and forced flowers"; Dickens's Miss Havisham, with her rotting wedding feast, might have had an epergne at the table's centre — the branching arms now holding dust; In a poem about the aesthetic of accumulation, the epergne concentrates the Victorian passion for display: "nothing was enough unless it branched, unless it bore, unless it gleamed from every angle"; The epergne's name — from the French for economy, though nothing about it is economical — offers a poet an irony to work with; A verse elegy for the great Victorian dinner party might place the epergne at its centre: "the centrepiece of all that ceremony — the silver tree around which the conversation orbited and fell."