Please help me to analyze A child ill, by John Betjeman as well as Business Girls.

A Child Ill
- John Betjeman


Oh little body, do not die.
The soul looks out through wide blue eyes
So questioningly into mine,
That my tormented soul replies
"Oh little body, do not die
You hold the soul that talks to me,
Although our conversation be
As wordless as the windy sky."

So looked my father at the last,
Right in my soul before he died,
Though words we spoke went heedless past
As London traffic-roar outside.
And now the same blue eyes I see
Look through me from a little son,
So questioningly, so searchingly
That youthfulness and age are one.

My father looked at me and died
Before my soul made full reply.
Lord, leave this other light alight
Oh little body, do not die.


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Business Girls
--John Betjeman

From the geyser ventilators
Autumn winds are blowing down
On a thousand business women
Having baths in Camden Town

Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,
Steam's escaping here and there,
Morning trains through Camden cutting
Shake the Crescent and the Square.

Early nip of changeful autumn,
Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,
At the back precarious bathrooms
Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions
Business women lie and soak,
Seeing through the draughty skylight
Flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there, poor unbelov'd ones,
Lap your loneliness in heat.
All too soon the tiny breakfast,
Trolley-bus and windy street!


Les



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/23/2006 06:34PM by lg.

I am not sure what kind of analysis you are looking for. Both seem fairly straightforward, I mean. In the Child ill one, he is looking at a sick boy/girl and hoping s/he does not die from the illness. He compares that look he sees in the child's eyes to a similar look he previously saw in his fathers eyes, before his father died. It's in iambic tetrameter, mostly abab ... All endings are masculine, and stanzas are 8-8-4 lines.

The business girls is also tetrameter, but trochaic this time, with masculine even lines and feminine odd ones, all stanzas quatrains. I am not familiar with the city he mentions, but am guessing it is London and Camden is a neighborhood where working women might live. It would seem they are having their morning bath, in anticipation of heading out to the workaday world?

Both seem sad or nostalgic in tone, at least to my reading.

What else? Snapshot poems you say? Yeah, could be.

You're right about Camden being an area of London.

Geysers are gas heaters for the hot water supply. Turn on the tap and the gas lights and warms the water flowing through. If the ventilator gets obstructed then there is a build up of carbon monoxide in the bathroom and a dead business girl.