Poem Analysis Of Hanging Fire By Audre Lorde

Through repetition and a conversational tone, Audre Lorde conveys the isolation and anxiety of a young girl who is trying to bridge the gap between childhood and adulthood. “Hanging Fire” goes through a young girl’s thoughts. These thoughts illustrate her isolation, anxiety, and lack of guidance. This poem shows what happens when children are growing up alone, and hints and the horrible things that can happen. The first stanza of this poem introduces the speaker, a fourteen year old girl. The girl immediately starts stating her worries, “my skin has betrayed me the boy I cannot live without still sucks his thumb in secret how come my knees are always so ashy”. These worries seem relatively normal for a girl of her age, and illustrates the conversational tone used throughout this poem. It also demonstrates how young she is, as exemplified in the boy who “still sucks his thumb in secret”. They are still young, but they are trying to hide it. Suddenly, the stanza shifts to a much darker tone, “what if I die before morning and momma’s in the bedroom with the door closed”. This statement is startling, as the lines before it were extremely casual. The girl’s thoughts are racing from boys to death, and her mother is “in the bedroom with the door closed”.

Here, she is worrying about how she has “to learn how to dance in time for the next party” and how her “room is too small”. Just as the last stanza did, the tone shifts again, “suppose I die before graduation they will sing sad melodies but finally tell the truth about me”. The girl again has shifted from worrying about something trivial, like learning to dance, to something much darker, like imagining her own funeral. Her thoughts have gone beyond, “if i die”, to what would happen if she actually did. This stanza also ends with, “momma’s in the bedroom with the door closed”. This line is repeated to further illustrate this girl’s