Shelley — the Staffordshire pottery known for its bone china teawares, particularly the elegant "Mode" and "Eve" shapes of the 1920s and 1930s — appears in poems about the interwar drawing room and the aesthetics of tea; A poem about a 1930s tea party might describe a Shelley service: "the cups so fine the afternoon light came through them — pale bone china holding Earl Grey like a held breath"; Shelley's art deco designs — geometric handles, striking colour combinations — make it a useful image for poems about the 1920s confidence in modernism's domestic possibilities; In a poem about a mother's tea things passed to a daughter, a Shelley service carries the weight of a particular femininity: "the cups her mother chose, the shapes she grew up knowing — the thin rim, the delicate handle, the specific pleasure of the right tea in the right vessel"; The fragility of Shelley's bone china — translucent and fine — suits poems about the interwar period itself: a refinement built on a surface that could not hold; A poem about a charity shop might describe a Shelley cup and saucer: "the gold line barely worn, the shape still speaking of a ceremony that required such shapes — the morning tea, the afternoon tea, the whole day organised around cups."