The Ballad of the Landlord Literary Elements

The speaker for most of the poem is a Black man who is a tenant in a badly maintained home. Though the tenant narrates the bulk of the poem in the first person, the poem later shifts into the third person. It also contains dialogue from the landlord character and quotes lines from a newspaper.

Six quatrains written in ABCB rhyme scheme, followed by three tercets, with a DEF GEF HII rhyme scheme. The poem's meter is inconsistent but makes heavy use of iambs and trochees, with occasional spondaic stanza endings.

Hughes avoids figurative language and sticks to highly literal language, emphasizing at first the informal, conversational dialogue of the tenant, and then the lifeless, distant voice of the newspaper.

The line "Way last week" uses repeating, alliterative "W" sounds, while the phrase "gonna get eviction orders" uses alliterative "G" sounds. Meanwhile, "Headlines in press" and "tenant held" both contain assonant, short "E" sounds.

The poem's form and musical elements are themselves ironic, creating an unexpected juxtaposition beside its dark, prosaic subject matter. The tenant's rhetorical questions to his landlord, such as "You gonna cut off my heat?" are examples of verbal irony—rather than sincerely asking the landlord if he plans to cut off the heat, the tenant is sarcastically mocking him for these abuses of power.

Ballad, lyric poem

The poem is set near a dilapidated rental, likely in a poor neighborhood, in an unnamed American city

By turns resigned, lamenting, detached, and angry

The protagonist is the tenant, while the antagonist is his landlord and, more broadly, the racist systems that the landlord symbolizes and benefits from.

The major conflict is the fight between the tenant, who wants his landlord to provide a safe and comfortable living space, and the landlord, who wants to avoid making repairs and gather rent money from his tenant.

The climax occurs when the police arrive and the poem slips into a third-person perspective.

The tenant's line "It's a wonder you don't fall down," though polite and deferential, also foreshadows the escalating violence between the two men that will occur in later stanzas.

The tenant's question "Don't you 'member I told you about it/Way last week?" is an understated, softened way to express deep frustration without revealing the extent of his feelings. Meanwhile, the newspaper's summaries are also understatements, describing vivid, loaded events in the standard dispassionate voice of a journalist.

The poem doesn't allude to specific events or people, but it does allude to a historical reality of racial inequality, often manifesting through housing discrimination and punitive criminal justice procedures, in U.S. cities.

The word “steps” is a synecdoche, referring to the staircase as a whole.

The landlord uses hyperbole when calling the police, telling them that the tenant is “trying to ruin the government/And overturn the land!”

The short, clipped lines "Copper's whistle!" and "Patrol bell!" use subtle onomatopoeia, hinting at the abrupt, loud sounds made by these objects.