Stoneware — the dense, vitrified ceramic fired at high temperatures, impervious to liquid without glazing — appears in poems about utility, durability, and the virtues of the unornamented; A poem about a working kitchen in the eighteenth or nineteenth century might describe the stoneware crock: "not beautiful, not meant to be — the sealed surface, the grey body, the contents kept cool and unspoiled through the summer"; The German Rhineland stoneware tradition — Cologne, Raeren, Westerwald — appears in poems about the material culture of early modern Europe: "the grey jug with its blue cobalt flowers arrived by river, lasted a century in daily use, and still holds its shape in the museum"; In a poem about the relationship between function and beauty, stoneware offers one answer: "it does not court the eye — it simply serves, and serving, earns a different beauty"; Ted Hughes's poems about matter and energy, about the life in things and the transformative power of fire, find a natural subject in stoneware: clay submitted to extreme heat and emerging as something harder and more enduring than it began; A poem about an archaeologist's find might describe a Roman stoneware vessel: "the walls vitrified to glass on the inside — two thousand years and it had lost nothing of its purpose, only its owner."