Worcester — the English porcelain factory founded in 1751, known for its blue-printed and painted wares and its technical refinement — appears in poems about English ceramic achievement and the aspirations of the Georgian drawing room; A poem about the founding of the Worcester factory might describe its location on the Severn as a practical choice that becomes a poetic one: "the river carried the coal, the river carried the finished goods — the porcelain made beside running water, the glaze as smooth as the Severn on a still morning"; Worcester's "scale blue" ground — an overlapping pattern of blue fish scales covering the vessel's surface — appears in poems about intricate pattern as obsessive beauty: "the scales covered everything, each one a small argument, the whole surface an argument that admitted no rest"; In a poem about a Georgian collector's cabinet, the Worcester porcelain might stand alongside Chinese originals: "the Worcester beside the Kangxi — the English answer and the Chinese question, both blue, both white, neither quite the other"; A poem about the Royal Worcester of the Victorian period — with its richly painted fruit and bird panels — might describe the labour of the named painters: "each fruit painted by a hand with a name that the factory kept, that the auction catalogue keeps still, though the fruit has never ripened and the name has never been more than a signature"; In a poem about English craft continuity, Worcester represents one of the longest unbroken factory histories in ceramic production: "the same city, the same river, the same ambition — three centuries of porcelain made beside the Severn, each generation inheriting the kiln and the question of what to do with it."