The Beautiful Toilet
The Beautiful Toilet - meaning Summary
Beauty in Constrained Solitude
The poem presents a quietly elegiac scene: vivid, blue riverside and overgrown willows frame a young mistress who hesitates at a doorway, pale and slender. It then reveals her history as a former courtesan now married to a drunken husband who frequently abandons her. The contrast between lush exterior imagery and her constrained, lonely domestic life highlights vulnerability, social decline, and the gulf between youthful appearance and compromised circumstances.
Read Complete AnalysesBlue, blue is the grass about the river And the willows have overfilled the close garden. And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth. White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door. Slender, she puts forth a slender hand; And she was a courtezan in the old days, And she has married a sot, Who now goes drunkenly out And leaves her too much alone.
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