the landlady poem analysis essay

The Landlady

By Margaret Atwood

This is the lair of the landlady She is a raw voice loose in the rooms beneath me. the continuous henyard squabble going on below thought in this house like the bicker of blood through the head. She is everywhere, intrusive as the smells that bulge in under my doorsill; she presides over my meagre eating, generates the light for eyestrain. From her I rent my time: she slams my days like doors. Nothing is mine. and when I dream images of daring escapes through the snow I find myself walking always over a vast face which is the land– lady’s, and wake up shouting. She is a bulk, a knot swollen in a space. Though I have tried to find some way around her, my senses are cluttered by perception and can’t see through her. She stands there, a raucous fact blocking my way: immutable, a slab of what is real. solid as bacon.

Summary of The Landlady

• Popularity of “The Landlady”: When it comes to poetry, Margaret Atwood, the Canadian postmodern novelist, has also dabbled her fingers in poetry and has proved her superb skills in dealing with the same type of poetic subjects . This beautiful poem “The Landlady” first appeared in 1968 when she published her fifth poetic collection, The Animals in 1968. It is unclear why she put the landlady or other such characters in the collection having such a title. However, it is clear that she has demonstrated extreme disliking when painting the pen picture of such a landlady. The popularity of the poem rests on the presentation of the intrusive image of a landlady whose house she rented for a while.
• “The Landlady” As a Representative of Exploiting House Owners: Margaret Atwood, the Canadian exponent of feminism, has suddenly shown the other side of her philosophical nature by presenting an exploitative landlady. She states that her house is like her den where she expresses her views in her rough voice, adding that she always bickers and squabbles in the lower portion of the house the poet has rented. She further states that her ubiquity rather embarrasses her so much so that she smells the lady everywhere and that she slams doors, torturing the poet. She wakes up the poet when she shouts and demonstrates her bulky body and appears at places where the poet least expects her. In fact, she has rather become her solid obsession – as “solid as bacon.”
• Major Themes in “The Landlady”: The exploitation of house owners, the intrusiveness of house owners, and the torturing nature of landladies are major themes of this poem. Feminism does not mean supporting women even when they come down to torture people depending on them in some or the other way. The pen picture of this landlady is such that she has proved her exploitative nature when dealing with the poet that she makes a lot of noise, slams her doors, and enters her privacy when she least expects her, and yet she continues with this intrusiveness and does not let her take some hour of rest. Her intrusion into her private affairs becomes a knot and whenever the poet is about to forget, she reappears to torture her and is always a reality when illusions surround the poet.

Analysis of Literary Devices Used in The Landlady

Margaret Atwood uses various literary devices to enhance the intended impact of her poem. Some of the major literary devices are as follows.

• Assonance : Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in the same line, such as the sound of /e/ in “From her I rent my time” and the sound of /o/ in “To find some way around.”
• Consonance : Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line, such as the sound of /r/ and /s/ in “She is everywhere, intrusive as the smells” and the sound of /b/ and /d/ in “the bicker of blood through the head.”
• Imagery : Imagery is used to make readers perceive things involving their five senses. Margaret Atwood used imagery in this poem, such as “the light for eyestrain”, “and when I dream images” and “of daring escapes through the snow.”
• Metaphor : It is a figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between objects different in nature. The poet used the metaphor of raw voice for the lady. She also used other metaphors for her, comparing her to smell, a light, bulk, and a knot.
• Simile : It means to use direct comparison of things to understand the thing being compared. The poet used the simile of bacon, comparing the hardness of the lady.
• Symbolism : Symbolism is using symbols to signify ideas and qualities, giving them symbolic meanings that are different from the literal meanings. The poem shows symbols, such as lair, voice, doorsill, smell, and images to show the nagging lady and her bad habits.

Analysis of Poetic Devices Used in The Landlady

Poetic and literary devices are the same, but a few are used only in poetry. Here is an analysis of some of the poetic devices used in this poem.

• Diction : It means the type of language. The poem shows good use of formal, poetic, and precise diction .
• Free Verse : It means to write or use verses without any rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. This poem is a free verse poem.
• Stanza : A stanza is a poetic form of some lines. There are seven stanzas of varying lengths in this poem with two one-liners.
• Tone : It means the voice of the text. The poem shows an anguish through tortured, irritating, and frustrated tone .

Quotes to be Used

The following lines are useful to quote when talking about the torture of such torturing ladies.

She stands there, a raucous fact blocking my way: immutable, a slab of what is real. solid as bacon.

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Poetry Essay Activity The Landlady

Poetry: analyzing the elements, english literature and composition, natomas high - sacramento-ca, recommended for you, students also viewed.

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What a great poetry essay looks like.

DIRECTIONS: This is a good opportunity for you guys to think critically about what a high-scoring AP Lit Poetry Essay looks like in practice! Below, you’ll see two sample essays written in response to the 2019 AP Lit sample question. One is a very strong essay (scored 6/6), and the other is average (scored 3/6). Beside each essay, you’ll see questions inspired by the actual College Board commentary, which are designed to help you understand what exactly the graders look for in a great Poetry Analysis Essay! *I would advise looking at the passage and prompt as you read these SAMPLE STUDENT ESSAY #1 = 3/ (1/1 for thesis, 2/4 for evidence + commentary, 0/1 for sophistication)

(Write your response in the table below) In P. Page’s poem “The Land lady,” the speaker portrays the landlady as a predator, as if she was stalking her prey. This portrayal is accomplished through the poets use of diction, and tone. Throughout the entirety of the poem, diction is used with unsettling negative connotation whenever describing the landlady, or when describing boarders’ reactions to the landlady. This is exemplefied in many instances, such as when the landlady “peers stippled with curious flesh” (lines 11-12). The word flesh has a creepy connotation, dehumanizing the boarders and painting an image of soulless, lifeless bodies instead. The landlady “trembles” to know her boarders’ thoughts, and “jumps” when boarders’ move (line 17-18); this diction also suspense for they are descriptive verbs of high energy motions. The negative connotation throughout this poem’s diction paints the landlady in an ill, negative light and add layers of suspense to the reader. The poet devises a creepy, unsettling, suspensful tone throughout the poem, in order to convey how the boarders feel about the landlady. The poet describes the measures boarders take to avoid succumbing to the landlady in great detail, painting the landlady as a threat, and the boarders, in turn, as victims. The creepy tone adds suspense to the landlady and boarder’s relationship, coming across to the reader as tense and dangerous. The poet uses many devices in order to convey that landlady as a threat and portray her in an “evil” light; these devices include a creepy tone, and negative diction. 1.) A positive point of the scorers was that this student did include some specific evidence that connected to his/her thesis. Name an example of this. 2.) However, the scorers said that the student “misread” or did not fully explain his/her evidence (quotes) in multiple instances. Name 2 examples of this. 3.) Concerning sophistication, the scorers claim that the student relied “only on the repetition of a single, simple claim” and even “misread” some of his/her given evidence. Explain how you think this student could have developed a more “complex literary argument.”

SAMPLE STUDENT ESSAY #2 = 6/

(1/1 for thesis, 4/4 for evidence + commentary, 1/1 for sophistication)

(Write your response in the table below) One’s predestination for introversion or extroversion – whether due to genetics, trauma, or environment – may seem to be an asset to most, or even passive at the least. In reality, this can be crippling. The Landlady’s message as portrayed by P. Page, directly addressed the unsettling ‘creepiness’ of an individual who is dependent on the many worlds that exist around her in the tenants and their personal lives. The landlady’s complexity makes the audience feel something slightly less intense than condemnation, but also less sympathetic than pity, as reinforced by Page’s implementation of active verbs, abrupt punctuation and selective personification. The landlady’s insatiable dependence on others is more fundamental to her existence than can be understood by anyone with a joyful life of their own. Page equips stanza four with active physical verbs, such as “unlocks” (line 14) and “searches” (line 15, portraying the physical aspect of her reliance on others’ lives. She actively gathers physical evidence of their goings-on. Page follows this with active emotional verbs characterizing stanza five. As the landlady “wonders” (line 17) and “dreams” (line 18) of what happens in the unavailable portions of the boarders’ lives, her mindscape is established as being shaped by what “they” (lines 17 and 18), the boarders, do. Page then takes this concept to a new depth with the reappearance of the subject-less active verb in line 30 to show that the landlady “prays” based on her hopes with regard to the boarders. This audience in response feels disgusted by the physical violations of privacy and irked by the mental dedication the landlady spends on virtual strangers, but her spiritual reliance on them is apparently not her choice. This can rather be seen as a condition that the landlady is forced to live with, establishing complex conflict in the audience between disapproval and empathy. The landlady’s approach to self-fulfillment is unusually formulaic, like Page’s syntax. Abrupt punctuation separates short and direct sentences, such as in stanza two. The first line is 7 words followed by a colon, then the next line is 6 words followed by a semicolon. The poem continues with many more short and direct compositions that reflect a formulaic way of thinking – like the landlady’s – rather than the more open-ended nature of long sentences and ideas with many clauses and little punctuation. Page’s personification adds human traits to inanimate objects the same way that the landlady creates an image of people she does not personally know. Line 3 allows the silence to swallow, giving humanistic traits to something that is empty and unfulfilled – a lack of sound. This parallels the landlady’s application of ‘exciting’ sounds to the unexciting silences and reservations of strangers. She, in effect, applies traits and stories to the “impersonal” (line 2) boarders. These parallels between the landlady and Page’s use of personification help define the complex nature of what the landlady is trying to do for self-fulfillment. The futility of the landlady’s condition impedes her life in a way that also violates others’, leading to a complicated response from the audience. By examining Page’s charged active verbs, abrupt punctuation and line structure, and personification, the landlady’s actions and motives become clearer, establishing an emptiness inside herself without those around her. Whether or not this is the cause of the landlady’s ill wishes in the final line of the poem, the audience is left with a mix of complex emotions between anger and empathy. 1.) This advanced student essay elicited this comment from the scorers: “it provides specific evidence in the body paragraphs that are directly connected to the thesis, and it consistently connects that evidence to the thesis with explicit commentary.” Name two examples of this kind of “explicit commentary” about the student’s given evidence/quotes. 2.) The scorers praised this student’s thesis, awarding both the point for the thesis and the point for sophistication. What do you find to be the most interesting or powerful part of this student’s thesis, and why? 3.) Another specific strength of this essay’s sophistication that the scorers mentioned is that “the student notes the mirroring of content and form.” In other words, the student connected his/her analysis of form (the poem’s structure/composition) to the thematic interpretation of the poem. Name 1 instance of this.

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Topic : Poetry: Analyzing the Elements

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The Landlady

16 pages • 32 minutes read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

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Analysis: “The Landlady”

The poem begins with a single line stanza stating, “This is the lair of the landlady” (Line 1). The statement sets the tone for the poem, as it paints the landlady as a villain by using the word “lair,” which has negative connotations, e.g., a dragon’s lair, and positions the reader directly in the landlady’s path to make the reader feel trapped by her the way the speaker does. In the second stanza, the landlady becomes a disembodied, “raw voice” (Line 3). In Line 4 the landlady is “loose in the rooms beneath me,” evoking the image of an animal with unfettered access. In Stanza 3, the reader is directed back to the voice of the landlady and the urgency of situation is diminished momentarily as, instead of a dragon, the chatter of the voice is now akin to “henyard / squabble” (Lines 5-6), and instead of an animal roaming through the building, the noise is “going on below / thought” (Lines 6-7) as in background noise or something only revealed in the unconscious mind. This brings to mind the chattering of old ladies telling each other the latest gossip. By the last line in Stanza 3, the landlady is merely “the bicker of blood through the head,” like a headache or the pulsing of blood at the temples, and she becomes an internal threat rather than an external one.

This idea of an internal threat is carried into Stanza 4, which begins, “She is everywhere, intrusive as the smells” (Line 9). To smell something, it must be taken into the body. It is also more difficult to get away from an internal threat since it is something carried around within the body as well. In Lines 11 and 12, the omnipresent landlady “presides over my / meagre eating” and “generates the light for eyestrain,” which tells the reader the landlady controls every aspect of the speaker's life, from the food they eat to the amount of electricity they can use.

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From Stanza 4 to Stanza 5, the speaker elaborates that it is not simply these things the landlady controls but it is also “[f]rom her I rent my time” (Line 14). The landlady is not only pervasive but a powerful force that controls the speaker and “slams / my days like doors” (Lines 15-16). The speaker concludes Stanza 5 by saying “[n]othing is mine” (Line 17). She relinquishes control to the force of the landlady, whom she cannot escape.

Stanza 6 begins with a lower case “and,” indicating the first line in the stanza, “and when I dream images” (Line 18), is a continuation of a thought or an idea the speaker only fully crystallizes part-way through. The speaker tells the reader they can't even escape the landlady while dreaming of “daring escapes through the snow” (Line 19) because they find themselves “walking / always over a vast face / which is the land–lady’s” (Lines 20-23) only to “wake up shouting” as if from a nightmare. The omnipresence of the landlady pervades every aspect of the speaker’s life, from the air they breathe to the light they use to see and even into the speaker’s dreams.

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In Stanza 7, the speaker elaborates on the feeling of being trapped and surrounded by the landlady and describes her as “a bulk, a knot / swollen in a space” (Lines 24-25). The space is the speaker’s home, a place they should be able to relax and leave the worries of the day at the door, but the landlady does not give her room to breathe or move around the place without the feeling of someone else being there. The stanza ends with “my senses / are cluttered by perception / and can’t see through her” (Lines 27-29). These lines illustrate the speaker's confused state and how befuddled they are from being completely overwhelmed by the landlady’s constant presence. The idea has been building throughout the poem: In Stanza 3 the landlady “is everywhere, intrusive as the smells / that bulge in under my doorsill; / she presides over my / meagre eating, generates / the light for eyestrain” (Lines 9-13). The landlady has infiltrated her senses of smell, taste, and sight, and now the speaker “can’t see through her” (Line 29).

A less literal interpretation of the poem so far is that the speaker is speaking in metaphors about depression. Even when the speaker might feel fine, the depression, represented by the landlady, still creeps around just out of the speaker's conscious mind. The threat of a darkening mood is always there "loose in the rooms beneath me" (Line 4). As the depression settles in, it becomes a "continuous henyard / squabble" (Lines 5-6) in the speaker's mind. It mitigates the speaker's ability to eat, and though they may be able to sit in the artificial light, the darkness inside makes seeing things clearly a challenge. Eventually, the speaker becomes overwhelmed by the growing melancholy and has a difficult time seeing beyond it—they can't really remember what their life was like before the depression settled in, and they also can't really see their way out of it. Their depression is their landlady since it has control of their basic abilities to function.

In the final lines, the speaker concludes that the landlady “stands there, a raucous fact / blocking my way: / immutable” (Lines 30-32). The speaker sees the landlady as an unmovable thing that cannot be challenged and who is assaulting the speaker's sense of sound , sight, and touch and “blocking my way” so the speaker cannot be themself (Line 31). This also plays into the metaphor of depression, as the speaker is fully immersed now and cannot see their way out. The speaker's "senses / are cluttered by perception" (Lines 27-28), which means the depression is deep enough now that it shades everything for the speaker—they can see, hear, feel, taste, or touch just like they could before, but their perception is skewed, thus they interpret the world around them as darker and sadder than it was before. Everything in their world is influenced somehow by this deepening depression.

The poet ends the penultimate stanza by adding that the landlady is “a slab / of what is real,” noting that the landlady’s world is small, but like a slab the landlady blocks the speaker from the world that lies beyond (Lines 32-33). The final stanza, like the first, is a single line, “solid as bacon,” that references the slab in Line 32 as well as giving the reader a sense of taste (Line 34). To American readers it may be important to note that Canadian bacon is much thicker than American bacon and more closely resembles a small slab of meat. This idea of the slab being bacon also shrinks the landlady and the world in which she has trapped the speaker: While the landlady is a large presence in the speaker's daily life, her presence is still small and relatively inconsequential to the world at large. It could also be a firm insult to make sure the reader understands exactly what the speaker thinks about the landlady—she's a pig. This not only ends the poem with a declarative stab, but it calls back to the barnyard imagery of the chickens in the "henyard / squabble" in Lines 5-6. This ties the imagery at the beginning of the poem to the imagery at the end and helps the poem feel complete.

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The Landlady Poem

“The Landlady” by Margaret Atwood is a significant poem that delves into themes of power, identity, and the complexities of human relationships. This article explores the depth and nuances of Atwood’s “The Landlady,” examining its thematic elements and the unique style that characterizes Atwood’s poetry.

Overview of Margaret Atwood’s “The Landlady”

In this poem, Atwood presents a complex character in the form of the landlady, who symbolizes authority and control. The poem is a reflection on the relationship between the landlady and her tenant, exploring themes of dominance, femininity, and the constraints of societal roles.

Themes and Literary Techniques

• Power Dynamics : Atwood explores the power imbalance between the landlady and the tenant, highlighting themes of control and submission.
• Femininity and Identity : The poem delves into aspects of femininity, examining how women’s identities are shaped and often confined by societal expectations.
• Imagery and Symbolism : Atwood uses vivid imagery and symbolism to convey the underlying tensions and emotions in the poem.

Atwood’s Narrative Style

Margaret Atwood is known for her sharp, incisive poetry that often challenges societal norms and expectations. In “The Landlady,” she employs concise, impactful language to create a vivid portrayal of the characters and their complex dynamics.

Impact and Reception

“The Landlady” by Atwood is celebrated for its thought-provoking content and its ability to engage readers in a deeper discussion about power structures and gender roles. It’s a testament to Atwood’s prowess as a poet and a storyteller.

Margaret Atwood’s “The Landlady” is a compelling exploration of power, identity, and the societal roles that shape human interactions. The poem stands out for its evocative imagery, nuanced character portrayal, and its insightful commentary on the human condition, making it a notable piece in contemporary poetry.

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The Landlady by Margaret Atwood: poem analysis

• margaret-atwood

This is an analysis of the poem The Landlady that begins with:

This is the lair of the landlady She is...

More information about poems by Margaret Atwood

• Analysis of Sekhmet, The Lion-Headed Goddess Of War
• Analysis of In The Secular Night
• Analysis of More And More

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