Faience — tin-glazed earthenware from France or Germany, related to majolica and delftware — appears in poems about the decorative arts of early modern Europe as a surface of painted narrative and colour; The name "faience," derived from Faenza in Italy, carries geography in the glaze — poems can trace the technique's migration from Islamic potters to Italian renaissance workshops to French and German artisans; A poem about a seventeenth-century Rouen dinner service might describe its faience as "a painted argument about what blue could bear — vines, birds, and formal borders, all in the same fired breath"; In a poem about a museum's ceramic collection, faience occupies the middle distance between peasant pottery and royal porcelain: "not humble enough to be touching, not fine enough to be awe-inspiring, but possessed of a painted confidence all its own"; The irregular surface of faience — its glaze pooling slightly, its colours moving under the brush in ways the painter cannot entirely control — suits poems about the productive resistance of materials; Rainer Maria Rilke's meditations on objects and their inner lives might find faience a perfect subject: an object so thoroughly decorated it seems to carry its own story, its own world.