Ballad of the Landlord by Langston Hughes

First published: 1940; collected in Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951

Type of poem: Ballad

The Poem

In “Ballad of the Landlord,” Langston Hughes appropriates the traditional ballad form but uses it in a contemporary urban setting to relate a current and crushing social problem. This conjunction of traditional form and contemporary content lends further power to the poem’s cry for social justice. The poem contains nine ballad stanzas (although the strict stanzaic structure is abandoned in the last three) that, in traditional use of the form, would narrate a tale of a dramatic or romantic adventure. The story here, however, tells of protest and jail. In the opening five stanzas, the first-person narrator/tenant is talking to and complaining about a landlord who has not done the repairs that would justify paying the rent on his house. In the remaining four stanzas, readers are told of the terrible consequences of the narrator’s protest.

In the first stanza, the persona of the poem complains to the landlord (in direct address) about the leak in the roof that he first mentioned to him “Way last week.” The complaint in the second stanza is about the stairs that have not been fixed; the narrator is surprised that the landlord (who has apparently come by the narrator’s house to collect the rent) has not injured himself: “It’s a wonder you don’t fall down.” In the third stanza, the tenant refuses to pay the ten dollars the landlord is demanding until the landlord fixes “this house up new.” In the fourth stanza, the tenant repeats the multiple threats of the landlord—to get an eviction notice, to cut off the heat, and to throw the tenant’s furniture into the street—and, in the fifth stanza, the tenant replies by threatening to “land [his] fist” on the landlord.

The remaining four stanzas undergo a radical shift in point of view and tone and move further and further away from the tenant’s perspective and pleas. The sixth stanza is italicized in order to convey the hysterical and exaggerated words of the landlord: “Police! Police!/ Come and get this man!/ He’s trying to ruin the government/ And overturn the land!” The last three stanzas, in machine-gun fashion, contain society’s responses to those unfair charges: The police arrest the tenant (stanza 7) and throw him in jail (stanza 8); the newspaper headlines proclaim “MAN THREATENS LANDLORD/ TENANT HELD NO BAIL/ JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL” (stanza 9).

The poem, therefore, breaks into two uneven parts. In the first five stanzas, the tenant gives his story to a landlord who ignores the cries for adequate housing and fair treatment. In the last four stanzas, the point of view shifts to the landlord, then to the society as a whole, and finally to the newspaper headlines about the incident in the final stanza. It is significant that the word “Negro” is only used in the last stanza when the point of view shifts and the society that now has control wants to identify those it labels as criminals. The social justice the tenant demands in the first two-thirds of the poem becomes the jail this society imposes on its victims in the final third.

Forms and Devices

The most important device in “Ballad of the Landlord” is the ballad form itself. Meant to recount a story, the popular ballad form often includes dialogue (as here) and employs a simple four-line stanza rhyming abcb. Readers must wonder why Hughes would use such a traditional form for such an untraditional topic and employ it for only two-thirds of the poem. Actually, the ballad form has been used for centuries, as it is here, as a vehicle of social protest, and it is significant that a number of other twentieth century African American poets have employed the form in a similar way: Gwendolyn Brooks, for example, in “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed” (1960), Robert Hayden in “A Ballad of Remembrance” (1966), and Dudley Randall in “Ballad of Birmingham” (1966). African American poets, in short, have often utilized the ballad form as a convenient way to convey their multiple messages of social protest.

Again, however, Hughes only uses the form for two-thirds of the poem and then violates it with two three-line stanzas of a harsh, fragmentary third-person description of what happens to the protesting tenant followed by the concluding three lines of newspaper headlines. (Notice that a continuing rhyme helps to tie these three short, final stanzas together: bell/cell, bail/jail.) The simple ballad form of the first six stanzas, which conveys the struggles of the tenant against his landlord, gives way to the staccato response of the tenant’s society: eviction, arrest, and, finally, jail. Hughes has used the ballad form to build a poetic structure of contrasts that works well to his purposes.

Beyond the ballad form, the poem uses several other devices that define Hughes as among the most prominent African American poets of the middle decades of the twentieth century. The poetic diction of the tenant’s narration, like the meter, is conversational and colloquial (“Don’t you ‘member…?” and “You gonna cut off my heat?”) and works well in contrast to the more objective vocabulary of the concluding stanzas (like the staccato rhythm), especially the supposedly “neutral” language of the newspaper headlines (“MAN THREATENS LANDLORD”). The language of Hughes’s poetry, in “Ballad of the Landlord” and elsewhere, helps make it perfectly accessible in both form and content and is meant to convey an obvious, if ironic, message. Hughes, like many of his fellow African American poets in the 1920’s and 1930’s, wanted nothing to do with the difficulty and obfuscation that characterized so much of the high modernist verse of those decades.

Bibliography

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Harper, Donna Sullivan. Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories by Langston Hughes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995.

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Hokanson, Robert O’Brien. “Jazzing It Up: The Be-bop Modernism of Langston Hughes.” Mosaic 31 (December, 1998): 61-82.

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Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Tracy, Steven C., ed. A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.