The House (poem) Essay Questions

Discuss the relevance of the metaphor of the "house." Why is a house a particularly apt vessel for this poem's subject material?

A house is such a complex object—much more than a collection of walls, it houses a life, a childhood, a love affair or the collapse of it, and in its complexity and uniqueness it does resemble the human body.

Houses are also traditionally "women's domains," in patriarchal societies, where women are relegated to preparing food and cleaning the home. In this way, the house—and her own femininity—become the speaker's prison.

Houses can also be full of rooms and locked doors that can be broken into, and in this way, the house resembles the speaker's own feelings of isolation and vulnerability.

How does Shire use humor in this poem? What is its function?

"The House" uses dark humor to cover up the vast horror of much of its subject matter. The speaker uses it to downplay her pain, or often things she says are so intensely serious that they are read by others as humorous.

The "knock knock" joke, whose answer to "who's there" is "no one," indicates that the speaker may feel her existence is somewhat of a joke. She continues to tell people at parties that her body is a place people go to die, and everyone laughs, but she is serious; still, in this distance from truth and acknowledgment of trauma, the speaker is able to preserve distance from herself and her past.

More and more of this humor appears as the poem approaches its end, indicating that the speaker has begun to hide behind humor or metaphors to start to conceptualize herself.

Despite telling us that the house of her body is full of old lovers, the speaker still tells us that she feels like 'no one is home'. How does "The House" work with and portray feelings of emptiness?

"The House" is as much of a poem about feeling detached from the body as it is about feeling trapped in it. Despite the many men that the speaker keeps trapped within her—either by making them fall for her, or refusing to let them go herself—none of these men are really living; they are as ghostly as the speaker's memories of her childhood. The speaker's emptiness, then, comes from a feeling of detachment from the present moment because she is so stuck in the past.

By providing very few details, and by weaving in and out of linear time, the speaker achieves a feeling of detachment in the poem itself; she is a presence as ghostly as the men she speaks of, cracking dark jokes about her own feelings of lostness and displacement.

Many of Warsan Shire's poems are about diaspora, or migrant and refugee experiences. This poem, though not directly about those themes, could be said to be about a diaspora of the heart or spirit: it is about a woman whose body has been broken into so much that she feels she cannot live there anymore, and instead her ability to love has become warped so that love feels destructive and one-sided rather than creative and mutual.

The poem manages to reclaim a sense of identity and strength for its speaker, despite her feelings of emptiness, because it is rooted in powerful language, anger and autonomy. The speaker seems to be taking revenge on the men who have invaded her space by trapping and hurting the men who try to love her; and so the cycle of emptiness continues, but this time on the speaker's own terms.