The Landlady

Throughout “The Landlady” Atwood uses hard consonants to create sounds that help the actions reverberate within the poem. Words like “bulge” (Line 10), “squabble” (Line 6), and “shouting” (Line 23) have forceful sounds that punch through the poem and create a feeling of power. This power is attributed to the landlady. Atwood also uses alliteration with the hard-consonant sounds to bring even more power to the words in phrases, such as “bicker of blood” and “days like doors” (Lines 8, 16). Furthermore, Atwood uses the S sound to create movement within the poem—“shouting” (Line 23), “slams” (Line 15), “stands” (Line 30). The S sound physically takes longer to make and elongates these actions.

The poem is written in free verse, which is a poem that does not adhere to a specific structure, though Atwood does build a loose but deliberate structure for the poem with the number of lines in each stanza increasing in number then decreasing again and bookending the poem with single-line stanzas. The longer stanzas build a scene for the reader, each representing an aspect of torment the landlady is causing the speaker, while the shorter stanzas build tension.