The wine cooler — a vessel of silver, ceramic, or marble designed to hold ice for cooling a wine bottle at the table — appears in poems about Georgian and Regency formal dining as an emblem of the elaborate infrastructure of pleasure; A poem about a Regency dinner might describe the wine cooler: "the bottle stood in its ice, the silver rim sweating with the cold — the effort required to produce this temperature in an English June represented in the price of the dinner"; In a poem about the labour that supports luxury, the wine cooler concentrates the work involved in keeping something cold: the ice house, the winter harvest of ice, the servant who carried the bucket — all invisible at the table, represented only by the cold bottle; A poem about a country house's contents might describe a pair of wine coolers in the dining room: "the marble urns, their insides still stained by the ice of a hundred winters — the cold that the house kept in its rooms to serve its pleasures"; The wine cooler's formal shape — often classical, with lion-mask handles or vine decoration — gives it a place in poems about the aesthetics of function: "the bucket made to hold cold, made also to be looked at while holding it — utility dressed for dinner"; In a poem about the transition from Georgian formality to Victorian informality, the wine cooler moves from the dining room to the cellar: "the ice no longer carried to the table, the bottle served differently — the marble urn retired from a ceremony that had simplified itself out of needing it."