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.