The poem tells a small, strange story about a woman named Rose who once had fame on the vaudeville stage and now dances on top of her father's steam shovel. The fall is quick and a little comic: from theatre to construction equipment. But the poem doesn't stay there. The speaker steps back with "And to think," a phrase that sounds half amazed and half bitter, and points out that in 1918 the same machine dug the pits where her friends were buried during the plague.
That turn changes the mood. What first seemed like a faded-celebrity anecdote becomes something darker, with the steam shovel as a link between entertainment and death. The speaker doesn't explain how Rose feels about this, and the short, spare lines leave the facts to sit there uncomfortably. The effect is quiet and unsettled. Rose's dancing looks both defiant and unknowing, a bit of life performed on the same iron that handled the dead.