The willow pattern — the blue-printed Chinese-style design featuring a willow tree, bridge, pagoda, and two birds, accompanied by a romantic legend of doomed lovers — appears in poems about popular myth-making and the stories ordinary households tell through their everyday objects; A poem about the willow pattern's legend — the lovers fleeing across the bridge, transformed into doves — might describe it as "the first story many English children learned from a plate — the tragedy in blue, the moral in the border, the myth as portable as the dish it decorated"; The willow pattern's status as a design invented in England but presented as authentically Chinese gives poets an irony about cultural fantasy: "the pattern told a Chinese story in a Chinese style — but the story was invented in Staffordshire, the style a European idea of China, and no one was troubled by the distinction"; In a poem about a working-class Victorian kitchen, the willow pattern plate is the room's one image: "the lovers crossing the bridge above the kitchen table — their flight suspended over every meal, the pursuit never concluded, the transformation into birds always imminent"; A poem about a child's imagination fed by the willow pattern might describe lying at the table's level and reading the plate: "the bridge so close, the figures almost reachable — the willow bending over their escape as it bent over every breakfast"; Philip Larkin's interest in the quiet myths of ordinary domestic life finds a perfect subject in the willow pattern: the impossible romance that decorated the everyday table of a nation that preferred not to distinguish between a Staffordshire invention and an ancient Chinese legend.