Landlord, landlord,
My roof has sprung a leak.
Don't you 'member I told you about it
Way last week?
These first lines of the poem set the scene for the rest, establishing a basic conflict: a tenant has a neglectful landlord and must go out of his way to make the landlord repair his home. It's clear even in this first stanza that the tenant is frustrated. The line "way last week" implies that he has been asking the landlord to fix the leak for a long time, and, rhythmically, that line's spondaic meter has a dramatic, emotive effect. At the same time, the tenant is clearly trying hard not to reveal his frustration or act impolitely. He phrases his chiding as a gentle question, and, rather than telling or even asking the landlord to fix the leak, simply brings it up as an isolated fact.
What? You gonna get eviction orders?
You gonna cut off my heat?
You gonna take my furniture and
Throw it in the street?
This stanza shows the escalation of the fight between the two main characters, as the tenant's exaggerated politeness gives way to anger. His questions are rhetorical—as he quizzes the landlord about his next steps, he seems to be daring him to take action. At the same time, ironically, everything the tenant lists here is something the landlord could easily do. Thus, here Hughes shows the stakes of their fight: not only does the landlord have the ability to refuse to help his tenant, but he has the ability to evict him and make him homeless. Thus, even though the tenant feels powerful and bold here, these lines underscore his structural powerlessness.
MAN THREATENS LANDLORD
TENANT HELD NO BAIL.
JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL.
In these final lines of the poem, the tenant has been deprived of agency in every way. Not only is he in jail, but he no longer gets to be the speaker of his own poem. Instead, his relationship to the reader, and to the public, is now mediated through the unfeeling description of newspaper headlines. These headlines reduce his complex situation to one in which he is the sole aggressor, failing to account for the numerous ways in which his landlord provoked his anger. The headlines also reduce the tenant himself to a "Negro," displaying the way that, at least to powerful people in the outside world, the man's race renders every other part of his story irrelevant. Meanwhile, a rhyme scheme persists in this last stanza, though it differs from the one established earlier in the poem. The preservation of a catchy, almost childlike pattern of rhyme creates an ironic undertone here, since that rhyme is juxtaposed with a decidedly non-childlike and unpleasant story.
