The Ballad of the Landlord Essay Questions

Discuss how the poem changes between its fifth and sixth stanzas, as well as the significance of those changes.

For its first five stanzas, "The Ballad of the Landlord" sticks to a broadly consistent form, containing quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme. The first four of these stanzas are in the voice of the speaker, a tenant, while the fifth consists of dialogue voiced by the landlord—yet all five nonetheless are formally and sonically similar. The sixth stanza, which represents a radical and permanent shift, is entirely different. A tercet consisting of short lines, it lists various images associated with the tenant's arrest, dispensing with full sentences in favor of fragments. This departure, not only from the tenant's voice and point of view but from the entire structure that he has established, suggests that he has become deeply disempowered, losing control over his own narrative as soon as the police arrive. At the same time, the fact that the landlord speaks in the pattern established by the tenant suggests that, in their specific interpersonal context, the tenant has a greater degree of inherent strength and influence—the landlord, meanwhile, can only get his way by invoking the power of the police and courts.

How does Hughes use the conflict between the landlord and tenant to illuminate issues of race?

By describing an argument gone wrong between a white landlord and a black tenant, Hughes both draws attention to the inequalities that led to their dispute in the first place, and examines the way that race unfairly influences the outcome of the dispute. From the beginning of the poem, context clues tell readers that the men are of different races; perhaps chief among them is the difference between their dialects. They do not fight as a direct result of their race, but rather because of their unequal and adversarial roles as tenant and landlord, yet Hughes suggests that racism and resulting class differences are the driving force putting them in those two roles, allowing the white landlord to exert control over the tenant's life. Moreover, it is racism that allows their fight to spiral out of control. Because he is able, as a white person, to make use of the state's power structures in order to disproportionately punish the tenant, the landlord turns an argument between two people into an unevenly matched war between the tenant and a vast, bureaucratic power structure.