Sometimes I say to her friend
You ought to talk to her. Does
she know
What she's doing?
The speaker in this poem is the eponymous Cleaner in the title of the poem. She is describing how she feels when she sees a young female freshman college student going home with an older senior boy - not even a boy anymore, but a man, old enough to know exactly how to make an eighteen year old girl go home with him. He will choose a girl who is a freshman deliberately, knowing that he is moving on, and she will fall in love with him and spend the rest of her time in college miserable with her broken heart.
The Cleaner asks each girls' friend if they know what they are doing because she knows that they are being taken advantage of but each girl believes the boy in question is mad about them, believing that they are an equal partner in the impending hook up.
Everything the Cleaner sees whilst she is essentially part of the wallpaper contributes to her very dim view of men. She repeats that she "know what they're after" and it is clear that in her experience - or at least, from her vicarious experience - men are only after sex, and they are not to be trusted.
Still, in spite of the overcrowding,
I did my best to make them feel
wanted.
I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.
The Donkey explains that there really wasn't a great deal of room in the stable that Christmas night. There were far too many visitors. It's a very tongue-in-cheek view of the Nativity but it also does attribute to the donkey wisdom and foresight because he knows that there is something very special about the baby in the manger, and that together they are going to go a long way, both literally and figuratively. He is also happy in anticipation of being called to duty, and living up to his task.
The Donkey also shows himself to have the traditional British middle class manners that represent the poet rather than the donkey himself. The group of visitors are not very convenient, they take up too much room and they have definitely put the usual residents of the stable out quite a bit, but he is going to act as though this kind of hospitality is perfectly normal, and make them feel welcome.
No wife, kids home;
No money sense. Unemployable.
Friends, yes. But the wrong sort.
The Wicked Fairy is ironically disapproving of all of the people Jesus is going to grow up to befriend. She feels that he is a pessimist because he does not hit all of the marks that society says make a person successful; he has no family to speak of, no wife, no kids; he is friends with prostitutes rather than "nice girls" and she sees that his friends all have some kind of communicable disease; her views on lepers make her feel that Jesus is going to grow up to fall in with the wrong crowd entirely. She also does not realize that this is what was intended for Jesus and therefore her threats do not disturb him at all, because he has known from the very beginning what his end would be.
