The punch bowl — a large, often elaborately decorated bowl for serving punch at social gatherings — appears in eighteenth-century poems as an emblem of masculine conviviality and the culture of the bowl; A poem about a Hanoverian tavern night might describe the punch bowl at the centre of the table: "the silver ladle, the lemon floating, the rum smoking — the whole arrangement a declaration that the evening had properly begun"; Sunderland lustreware and Liverpool delftware punch bowls, often painted with ships, naval portraits, or patriotic inscriptions, give poems about Hanoverian England a specific object to turn; In a poem about the decline of punch culture with the rise of individual glasses, the punch bowl becomes an elegy for collective drinking: "the bowl that served thirty now serves no one — its ladle in a drawer, its interior dry"; The punch bowl's scale — large enough to require two hands and several visits — suits poems about excess and the pleasure of abundance shared; John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera" and its world of taverns and moral ambiguity inhabits the same space as the punch bowl: the social ritual that dissolves the distinctions of day.