The Pembroke table — a small table with drop leaves supported by hinged brackets or "elbows" — appears in poems about eighteenth and nineteenth-century domestic interiors as the most versatile and intimate of furniture forms; A poem about Jane Austen's writing practice — she is said to have written on a small table, possibly a Pembroke — makes the table a literary object: "the manuscript on the small table, the leaves of the table not much wider than the leaves of the novel"; In a poem about a modest but comfortable Georgian room, the Pembroke table serves as a breakfast table, a writing desk, a card table: "it was never the largest thing in the room but it was usually in use"; The Pembroke table's name — said to derive from the Countess of Pembroke who first commissioned the design — gives it an aristocratic origin suited to poems about how the habits of the great become the furniture of the ordinary; In a poem about a woman's life in the early nineteenth century, the Pembroke table is the site of correspondence, needlework, and private reading: "all the life that was not public happened at the Pembroke table"; A poem about a house clearance might describe a Pembroke table being carried out last: "the most useful thing, the most difficult to part with — the table at which everything small and necessary had been done."