Eavesdropping is the whole trick of "Steam Room Soliloquy." We never see the speaker, only hear her, a woman sweating in a steam room who has found a captive listener and will not let her go. The title is a small joke in itself: a soliloquy is supposed to be a character thinking aloud, alone, and yet this speaker keeps asking questions ("do you like crab?") and then answering them herself. She is technically in company and functionally alone, because nobody else gets a word in.
What she talks about is the poem's real subject, and it is not weight loss. It is food. She begins by comparing herself to a woman who weighs a hundred and twenty-four, announces that she must be "eighty more," and says "that's what I don't understand." Within a few lines she is describing "the steak and mushroom dish I fix," her husband's cocktails, a wine-and-sugar-and-cloves sauce, crab, lobster, a ham from a can. The poem's central idea is a gap between what she says and what she reveals. She claims "I don't eat much," yet the whole monologue is a menu. Her mind keeps returning to meals the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth.
The humour sharpens in the last stanza, where she complains that the steam room is "a tax / On one's poor nerves" and that it can "beat" all diets. Then comes the neat, sad-funny conclusion: "The less I eat, the more I weigh." The reader has just spent two stanzas watching her eat, or at least talk about eating, constantly, so the line lands as a joke at her expense. She cannot see the connection that is obvious to anyone listening. The poem trusts us to supply it.
The form helps enormously. The poem is written in rhyming couplets, brisk and bouncy ("fix" and "mix," "wine" and "fine," "play" and "weigh"), and this tidy chiming gives her speech a breathless, gossipy momentum, as if she cannot stop to draw breath. The couplets also feel faintly comic because the rhymes are so easy and so domestic. Nothing here rhymes on "love" or "sorrow"; it rhymes on "crab" and "dab." Where the rhythm trips, it does so on purpose. The line "God! the steam is hot today!" breaks her flow with an exclamation, and the final couplet is oddly clipped, as though she has run out of both breath and argument. The poem leaves her mid-complaint rather than resolving anything.
The details of her speech build a quiet portrait of a particular kind of life. There is a husband with a "limousine" who calls her "Baby" and tells her not to "exert yourself," a circle of women who play bridge, and long lunches that last "'til half past two." The judging by-the-imagery inference is hard to avoid: this is a comfortable, leisured, rather pampered existence, in which the steam room is one more pleasant way to pass the afternoon rather than a serious effort at health. Even her exhaustion ("I'm so all in") comes from doing very little. The poem never sneers outright, but the accumulation of cocktails, cream-rich dishes and bridge games does the work of gentle satire.
Notice, too, how she borrows other people's voices. The husband's line about the can of ham is dropped in quotation marks, and "the girls all say" her food is good. She is constantly gathering approval from outside, which makes her self-justifications ("I don't eat much") sound defensive. The one thing she never says is the simple truth the reader reaches alone.
Part of the poem's lasting appeal is how recognisable she remains. We all know someone who insists they barely eat, who complains about a problem while describing its cause in loving detail. The poem is a character sketch in miniature: forgiving, funny, and just sharp enough to make us wonder where we do the same thing ourselves.