The lacquered screen — a folding screen of lacquered panels, often decorated with chinoiserie scenes — appears in poems about Georgian and Victorian interiors as a device for dividing space and creating intimacy; A poem about a drawing room might describe a lacquered screen separating the pianoforte from the card table: "behind the painted willows, the other conversation — the music and the betting occupying the same room without acknowledgment"; The lacquered screen's painted world — pagodas, bridges, figures in silks — appears in poems about the European imagination of China as a realm of order and serenity constructed from desire; Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli" finds an analogue in the lacquered screen: art preserving a world that history has destroyed, the painted figures indifferent to the tragedy below; In a poem about illness, a lacquered screen placed around a sickbed separates the patient from the household's life: "the painted world faced outward — the sick one saw only the black back, the unpainted side"; A poem about a stately home's decline might describe the lacquered screen sold to a hotel lobby: "the chinoiserie figures now facing corporate furniture, the willows indifferent to the change."