Summary
Here, the speaker begins to confront his landlord more openly. He brings up the fact that his landlord is asking him to pay ten dollars, and says that he'll withhold any amount of money he owes until the landlord repairs his home. He asks the landlord what, exactly, he plans to do in order to win the argument, skeptically asking if he plans to evict the speaker, cut off his heat, and toss his possessions out. In response to the landlord's threats, the speaker mocks him, and then makes a threat of his own, telling him that he won't be able to talk at all if the speaker punches him. Then, using italics, Hughes signals that the landlord is speaking. The landlord calls for the police, telling them to come arrest his tenant because he wants to overturn the social order by stealing land and defying the law.
Analysis
In the poem's first two stanzas, the speaker, despite being in an obviously frustrating situation, was unfailingly polite. While variations in rhyme scheme and meter subtly hinted at his irritation, his literal meaning belied none of it. Here, Hughes reverses that dynamic. To a great extent, he preserves the rhythm and rhyme of the poem's early lines. True, he varies the number of syllables in his lines, and opts for some degree of rhythmic unpredictability, but overall, the poem remains very much what the title promises—that is, a ballad. A ballad is a type of narrative song, often passed down through oral folk tradition, that conveys a story through short, memorable verses. Hughes chooses to present his speaker's troubles in the form of a ballad, which creates a stylizing, distancing effect. The song form makes the tenant's complaints seem faraway and even soothing.
But, even while the ballad form remains intact in these few stanzas, they hold a great deal of unsuppressed emotion, conflict, and violence. Starting in the third stanza, the speaker is no longer concerned with acting polite or concealing his anger. He begins to question the landlord, tells him he won't be paying any rent, and eventually threatens to physically attack him. As their conflict becomes more and more aggressive, the ballad form begins to seem sharply ironic. Whereas at first, the form showcased the speaker's politeness, here it demonstrates how absurd those expectations of politeness are, when they're ineffective—and, in fact, when even threats and anger are effective. Moreover, the use of the songlike form can be read as a commentary on the inherent difficulty and even absurdity of turning these disputes into art. Hughes asks us how a conflict so violent, unfair, and deeply non-beautiful can justifiably be turned into art.
Then, as the landlord calls for the police, he commits an aggressive act by using the speaker's chosen form in order to turn the tables and hurt him. The landlord takes advantage of the poem he's been handed, using the meter, rhyme scheme, and four-line stanzas. He more or less collaborates with the speaker, but instead of working alongside him to help him, he uses the speaker's tools to bring him to ruin. In general, Hughes is critiquing the landlord as a parasitic or opportunistic person: he profits off of his tenant's rent, meanwhile doing all he can to avoid holding up his end of the bargain and keeping the house in good repair. Here, he's doing the same thing on the level of rhetoric, profiting off of his tenant's voice in order to get his way without having to do much work. In fact, he barely bothers to put together a convincing case in terms of his own victimhood. His claims are exaggerated and downright silly, and his verbs are scrambled: he tells the police that the tenant wants to "ruin the government" and "overturn the land," when the opposite construction ("overturn the government" and "ruin the land") would make more sense gramatically. Yet, because the landlord occupies a more powerful position in society, he's able to appropriate the tenant's money and words as he pleases.
