Soiled Dove
Soiled Dove - meaning Summary
Reputation Shaped by Circumstance
The poem sketches a woman whose public reputation is distorted after marrying a corporate lawyer. Once an independent chorus performer who paid her own way, she is recast as a "soiled dove" by changing circumstances: increased spending on beauty, a luxury car, and social expectations tied to her husband’s status. The speaker emphasizes irony and injustice as she endures material demands and her husband’s multiple affairs while being blamed for moral decline.
Read Complete AnalysesLet us be honest; the lady was not a harlot until she married a corporation lawyer who picked her from a Ziegfeld chorus. Before then she never took anybody's money and paid for her silk stockings out of what she earned singing and dancing. She loved one man and he loved six women and the game was changing her looks, calling for more and more massage money and high coin for the beauty doctors. Now she drives a long, underslung motor car all by herself, reads in the day's papers what her husband is doing to the inter-state commerce commission, requires a larger corsage from year to year, and wonders sometimes how one man is coming along with six women.
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