"The Landlady" Poetry Commentary

Margaret Atwood's theme in The Landlady is about the speaker's prison-like living situation in what can be assumed to be a dorm. The landlady has made home, the place where we can feel free and comfortable, to a suffering sentence. The landlady is sin control, and the speaker, a young university student, cannot escape from the landlady, physically nor mentally.
The Landlady is effectively written in free verse and is a run-on style of poetry, allowing the readers emotions and thoughts to carry to the next line all the way to the end of the poem. The poem runs for 9 stanzas, all of which v…