Summary
In the poem's first stanza, the speaker, a tenant, asks his landlord to come fix a leak in his apartment. He reminds the landlord that he mentioned the leak the week before, asking the landlord whether he remembers that previous conversation. The next stanza follows a similar pattern. Once again, the tenant calls out to his landlord, alerting him to broken steps in the apartment. He frames his concern in terms of the landlord's well-being, telling him that he's at risk of hurting himself when he visits his property.
Analysis
In these two early stanzas, the poem's speaker is deferential and polite. Rather than express overt frustration towards his landlord for neglecting the leak or the broken steps, the tenant gently asks him if he remembers talking about the problems, and even presents his own concerns as worries about the landlord's safety. Immediately, readers understand that there is an uneven power dynamic between the landlord and the tenant: even while discussing problems that urgently need to be fixed within his own home, the tenant has to work hard not to offend his landlord.
The poem's meter, form, and rhyme scheme turn the tenant's complaints into a song, further softening the poem's tone, as if to emphasize his deference: if he's bothering to present his concerns with all the frills of a song, then he must be carefully controlling his feelings. These first two stanzas, like the four that follow them, are quatrains, meaning they consist of four lines each. They each begin with the phrase "Landlord, landlord," a catchy, unrushed refrain. The comma in the middle of the line slows it down even more. Still, there are signs of a fraying temper under the speaker's controlled presentation. Both stanzas follow an ABCB rhyme scheme. This means that the first three lines don't rhyme, and we have to wait until the very end of the stanza for a rhyme to arrive and neatly wrap things up. This waiting creates tension and suspense, making us wonder if the speaker will be able to present a polite, rhyming face to the world—though he always manages to do so before the stanza ends. The tension is heightened by the fact that these two stanzas don't actually rhyme with one another: other than their matching first lines, they contain completely non-similar ending sounds.
The meter, like the rhyme scheme, is highly regular but contains enough nods to irregularity to make readers feel slightly uneasy. Both stanzas begin with the phrase "Landlord, landlord." The word "landlord" is an iamb—that is to say, a two-syllable unit with the stress on the second syllable. Thus, the line is written in iambic dimeter, meaning it consists of two iambs. In each stanza, that first line's iambic dimeter is followed by a line of iambic trimeter ("My roof has sprung a leak," and "These steps is broken down") keeping the poem's rhythm constant but extending the line's length by two syllables. But it's in the first stanza's third line that things start to feel truly disjointed and strange. The third line of the first stanza, "Don't you 'member I told you about it," begins not with an iamb but with a trochee. A trochee is essentially the opposite of an iamb—it consists of two syllables, but the stress falls on the first rather than the second. For instance, here, "Don't," and "'mem," are stressed. But that's just the beginning. Hughes then squeezes another six syllables into the line, and they don't really fit any recognizable or named meter. The phrase "I told you about it" feels as if the speaker is stumbling over his words, perhaps losing control of his emotions. Interestingly, while Hughes purposely abbreviates the word "remember" to "'member" in order to preserve the trochaic meter in the first half of the line, he doesn't abbreviate the two-syllable word "about" to "'bout." To abbreviate in this way would make the line's meter more regular, so Hughes's choice not to do so shows us that he's going out of his way to create sudden rhythmic irregularity.
We can spot another instance of the poem's meter revealing the speaker's feelings in the final line of each of these first two stanzas. Both of these lines end with a spondee, or a set of two side-by-side stressed syllables. In fact, the line "Way last week" might even consist of three stressed syllables, and the words "fall down" add a touch of threat or ominousness to the already dramatic spondee. By ending these two stanzas with a spondee, a more emotive and intense unit of poetic foot that brings the poem's songlike rhythm to a halt, Hughes lets us know that his speaker isn't as calm and controlled as he tries to appear.
