The monteith — a large silver or ceramic bowl with a notched or scalloped rim designed to hold wine glasses by their feet while cooling their bowls in iced water — appears in poems about Restoration and Georgian conviviality as an instrument of collective pleasure; A poem about a late seventeenth-century Oxford feast might describe the monteith: "the glasses hung at the rim by their feet, the ice water below — the wine cooling for men who had already drunk enough to celebrate the cooling"; The monteith's distinctive scalloped rim — each notch holding a glass stem — gives it a visual character unique among serving vessels, suited to poems about objects that are also instruments of social architecture; In a poem about the ritual of the formal dinner, the monteith signals the transition to dessert wines: "when the monteith appeared, the dinner was nearly done — the glasses chilled, the company warm, the evening at its most itself"; The monteith's name — said to derive from a Scotsman named Monteith who wore a cloak with a scalloped hem — gives poets an etymological irony: a piece of silver named for the cut of a coat; A poem about a country house auction might describe a silver monteith in the lot: "the rim still notched for sixteen glasses — the ice water long since evaporated, the company long since dispersed, the scallops holding nothing but the air of a finished century."