Teapot (lid)
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This teapot lid was produced in Staffordshire, the region of central England that dominated British ceramic manufacture in the eighteenth century, sometime between 1740 and 1750. It is associated with Aaron Wood, a modeler active in the Staffordshire potteries.
The piece is made of ceramic and measures 14.6 by 18.8 centimeters overall, with the container itself standing 11.5 centimeters high. It entered the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1943 as a gift from A. M. Luntz.
Teapots of this period reflect the growing popularity of tea drinking in Britain, which created steady demand for the small-scale wares that Staffordshire factories supplied.
Background drawn from Cleveland Museum of Art
Today's poem
From Sunset to Star Rise
Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not: I am no summer friend, but wintry cold, A silly sheep benighted from the fold, A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot. Take counsel, sever from my lot your lot, Dwell in your pleasant places, hoard your gold; Lest you with me should shiver on the wold, Athirst and hungering on a barren spot. For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge, I live alone, I look to die alone: Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge, Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back, My heart goes sighing after swallows flown On sometime summer's unreturning track.
Christina Rossetti · Public domain
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Christina Rossetti (author of "Goblin Market" and "Remember") was an English poet who wrote both romantic and devotional verse. "From Sunset to Star Rise" belongs to the introspective, often penitential strain of her work.
The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet. Its octave and sestet turn on the speaker's rejection of "summer friends," urging them to keep their distance from a life imagined as cold, barren, and self-enclosed. The imagery is drawn from pastoral and biblical sources — the sheep strayed from the fold, the thorn-choked garden, the hedged plot.
At its center is a study of chosen isolation. The speaker insists on living and dying alone, yet the closing lines admit that memory intrudes: the ghosts of "buried years" and departed friends return, and the heart still longs after "swallows flown" and a summer that will not come again.
Background drawn from PoetryDB & Wikipedia