The House (poem) Literary Elements

The poem's speaker is a woman who has experienced trauma, love, and pain, and is looking for ways to understand what happened to her. She has a propensity for very dark humor, and is haunted by specters of her past.

The poem is in free verse, with each stanza separated by a roman numeral.

The poem is built on an extended metaphor—that of a woman's body as a house. The house comes to represent the way that the speaker sees herself and the way she visualizes relationships with others.

The rooms of this house are metaphors for different parts of a woman's emotional landscape. The tools that men use to break their ways in are also metaphors for the ways that men force themselves upon women's bodies and spaces, physically or mentally.

Shire uses alliteration sparingly, from time to time; phrases like "bedroom/bathroom" in the first stanza are one example of this. In the third stanza, she uses "perhaps/plan/procedure" and "new/neat." Alliterations like these add to the poem's hypnotic, dreamlike feel, and largely make it feel gentler and more poetic than the subject matter it covers.

The poem ends with irony. The speaker tells people at parties that her body is a house where love comes to die, and everyone around her laughs, but ironically, she is not joking—she is deadly serious, expressing a fear that haunts her and inspired the poem.

The poem's tone is dark, tense, and evasive.

The protagonist is the speaker, who sometimes acts as an antagonist towards herself; the antagonists are the men who cause her harm.

The major conflicts in the poem occur between the speaker and the men around her, and the speaker and herself.

The poem has no real climax. It begins with darkness and tension, and moves away for a moment when it references the speaker's first love with more gentleness, before plunging back into the thick of her struggle.

If anything, the climax might be the point where the speaker tells the person asking her, "Show us on the doll where you were touched," and the narrator says, "Like this: two fingers in the jam jar
Like this: an elbow in the bathwater
Like this: a hand in the drawer."

These deeply haunting images provide windows into the poem's darkest heart, its deepest traumas, which presumably occurred when the speaker was little.

The poem foreshadows the sexual abuse that the speaker experiences from its very first paragraph, when her mother warns her that sometimes men come with keys and sometimes with hammers to break into the locked rooms inside all women.

This seems to be a warning, not an attempt to save her daughter. Her daughter will have to face the invasions and damages of men, the mother knows.

The poem continues to return to this metaphor and to the pain that it encases, constantly edging towards the poem's darkest moments in the paragraph about the social worker and the daughter remembering what happened to her in the house.

The poem alludes to various memories of the speaker's, without ever fully explaining them. It alludes to a sexual assault, but only through short fragments.

It alludes to various men who the speaker had relationships with, and alludes to various ways she kept them out or keeps them locked inside. In a way, the whole poem is an allusion, a sideways, upside-down look at a woman's experience, told in stories and refractions but never looked at straight-on.

The poem does personify a house—but really, instead of portraying a house as a living being, it is portraying the speaker as a house. This is more of an act of objectification than personification. Living things become inanimate objects; emotions become rooms and actions become tools. This serves to further emphasize the speaker's detachment from her body and from reality.