The title’s old slang for a prostitute lands with bitter irony. Sandburg insists the woman wasn’t “soiled” when she danced in the Ziegfeld chorus and supported herself honestly. What ruins her, in the speaker’s view, is marrying a rich corporation lawyer. Now she has luxury—a long car, beauty treatments, bigger corsages—but she has traded independence for a kind of legalized purchase. Meanwhile, her husband is unfaithful with six women, and she is left alone to read about his public career and wonder how he manages them all. The speaker’s tone is dry, blunt, and quietly outraged on her behalf. The mood is cynical and melancholy: wealth looks like a trap dressed up as success, and the real corruption isn’t in the chorus line but in respectable marriage.
Soiled Dove — Summary
Let 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.