Both fragile and strong, a mirror and a container – glass shares many properties with good poetry. Share your cracking verse here
Like so many everyday items we take for granted, glass originated in the Middle East. The earliest known manufactured glass objects are from Mesopotamia, and were made about 5,000 years ago. For most of the intervening period, glass was a luxury item, used for jewellery and expensive tableware. It must have seemed somewhat miraculous: a transparent, malleable, yet rigid substance, something between rock, water and air. Of course, these very properties have made glass a rich source of imagery for poets.
Glassblowing is an ancient art, as reflected in this Greek poem found on athird century Egyptian scroll that reflects the quasi-divine nature of the material. For a more recent glassblowing poet, Peter Goldsworthy, the glassblower’s deft, precarious and delicate operations form a mirror of the poet’s craft in Glass. Goldsworthy’s poem comes to rest on a pun on the word “still”; the blower forms a vessel of that name, but the timeless stillness of the best glassware is also present. Exploring similar territory, Thomas W Shapcott’s The Glass Vase stands outside time and place, and its great value is that it is breakable, that it stands for the fragility of “the thing made”, which is life itself.
Related: Poster poems: ice
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