Nobody in "Hell From Below" raises their voice, least of all the speaker, and that calm is what makes the poem so unsettling. It reads like a tour of a bargain rental: the neighbors are private, the area is "rough," and the hot water comes on right away. Only gradually do we register what is being described, a basement with sulphur in the shower, rats for landlords and a constant shrieking overhead. The central idea is how easily people learn to live with the intolerable, and how the mind builds cheerful explanations so it never has to name it.
The title sets up a joke that the poem then complicates. Hell is supposed to be down below, yet the speaker already lives in the basement, and the racket comes from "upstairs." Either the usual hierarchy has been turned over, or the whole building is infernal. The speaker never settles the question, which suits someone whose strategy is not to look too closely.
The imagery is comic on the surface and bleak underneath. "I sublet a basement from the rats / & commute to work on an exercise wheel" packs a lot into two lines: the speaker is not only sharing space with rodents but behaving like one, running hard and going nowhere. The line plays on the phrase "rat race" without ever using it. The sulphur smell is brimstone shrunk to a plumbing quirk, and the praise for the hot water is pure tenant pragmatism, hell with good service. The sharpest detail comes in the first stanza, where gang members "have taken to wearing police uniforms." Judging by that line, the poem is also about authority and menace becoming indistinguishable, though it leaves the reader to draw that out.
The poem's main tactic is a verbal reflex, the little hinge of "but" and "sure." The speaker meets people "with faces like crushed cigarette butts," an image that makes them look stubbed out and exhausted, then immediately adds, "but I'm sure they're perfectly nice / once you get to know them." "I hear things, sure—" works the same way, conceding a fact in order to explain it away. The explanations are the funniest and darkest moments: the screaming must be "some kind of BDSM party" or "an amusement park / with too many scary rides." Each guess turns suffering into entertainment that someone presumably agreed to. We watch a mind drafting its own defense, and the tentative "I guess" gives away how little it believes the story.
Formally, the poem is six unrhymed quatrains in plain, conversational speech. The ampersands and the offhand dash keep it casual, like a note scribbled to a friend. Because there is no rhyme to polish things, the deadpan depends on timing. "Who wouldn't?" lands as a short sentence after a long shrug of a setup. The stanzas are mostly built from a calm statement followed by an unsettling one, so the reader keeps being tilted. When the speaker says of the noise, "Whatever they're doing up there, / it's got rhythm," the poem makes its bleakest joke by treating pain as something to tap a foot to. The fire alarm "on the hour" and the "low thrumming, as if from a mill" give the horror a schedule, which is exactly why it can be tolerated.
The last stanza delivers the real turn. It is the longest sentence in the poem, stretching over four lines, and it ends with what has been a throwaway phrase: "what fresh hell is this." We expect the speaker to be woken by the shrieking. Instead "the shrieking stops / & the silence wakes me." The noise has become a lullaby, and its absence is what disturbs. The stock expression, which people usually say without meaning it, suddenly has a real object. The horror is no longer the screaming but how fully the speaker has adjusted to it, and the quiet makes him wonder what might be happening in its place.
The poem is significant because it makes this recognizable psychology funny without letting us off the hook. Many of us explain away what we would rather not face, whether in a building, a neighborhood or a country, and the poem shows how pleasant and reasonable that can sound. It also shows the cost, which is that we stop noticing we are in hell until the noise stops.