Gerry Stewart’s «Soap» opens with a body seen in fragments: “wet and / dry,” moody at “dusk” and “dawn,” sipping lemon tea. The woman never becomes a full named character; she is assembled from gleaming surfaces, citrine details, and the rhythm of daily viewing. The title points in two directions at once: soap as a cleansing product and soap as serial drama. Stewart never uses the word “soap” inside the poem itself, which makes the title hover over everything as a lens. In both senses, the poem suggests, a woman is turned into something repeatable and consumable.
The opening syntax is deliberately slippery. “I watch her body wet and / dry her moods” can be read as a body that is both wet and dry, or as the speaker watching her body and then drying her moods. Either way, the speaker stands outside the scene, observing rather than joining. The imagery is saturated with lemon. Lemon scents the tea, the shampoo, the slice placed “between glass and / blue eyes.” That repetition creates a false freshness, a clean, sharp, commercial brightness. Blonde hair, blue eyes, silk, and gold continue the palette: everything is bright, smooth, desirable. Yet the body is not whole. Stewart gives “body wet,” “blue eyes,” “silken breasts,” “golden child”—parts and products rather than a person. The poem’s woman is a collage of advertised femininity: lover, mother, professional, bride. “Beautiful / clothes shape silken breasts / swaddle golden child” joins eroticism and maternity in one continuous phrase, as if these roles are just adjacent images on a screen.
The construction matches that fragmentation. There is almost no punctuation, and many lines break on connectives or adjectives: “wet and / dry,” “at / dawn,” “then / wed.” The images bleed into one another, producing the fast, flickering logic of a montage. The only full stop arrives after “night and day. Beautiful,” giving a brief pause before the poem shifts from goddess imagery to the language of clothes, family, and business. Sound reinforces the turns: the sibilance of “lemon slice,” “silk,” and “swaddle” makes the poem feel rinsed and smooth, while oppositions—“wet/dry,” “dusk/dawn,” “unmarried/wed,” “everything/nothing”—set up the poem’s core instability.
Gradually the woman becomes a set of saleable qualities. She offers “intelligent conversation in / business in bed,” and her relationship status shifts from “unmarried then / wed.” Calling her “a goddess of love / night and day” gives her a mythic constancy, but the next lines undercut that with clothes and marketing. The phrase “unavailable but saleable” is the sharpest line in the poem. It names the paradox of a mediated ideal: she cannot be possessed, but she can be packaged, watched, and marketed. The speaker’s “relationship with her” lasts “one hour a day,” which is the timescale of a soap opera or a daily habit, not a lived intimacy. The word “relationship” sounds clinical next to the goddess imagery, as if the speaker has signed up for a service.
The ending refuses to settle. That hour is “everything, or nothing, or love.” The final line is the only one with commas, slowing the poem down so each possibility lands separately. The three options are not synonyms; they pull in different emotional directions. The poem does not tell the reader whether the speaker is devoted, empty, or in love, and that ambiguity is itself the point. A daily image can feel overwhelming and trivial at once. «Soap» is significant because it compresses a whole media-saturated way of desiring into a few flickering lines: the woman is clean, golden, and always just out of reach, sold back to the viewer as something that might be love.