Hanging Fire (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Audre Lorde
- First Published: 1978
- Type of Work: Narrative
- Genres: Poetry, Narrative poetry
The Poem
Audre Lorde’s “Hanging Fire” is a poem of thirty-five lines of free verse. The poem is divided into three stanzas with lines ranging in length from two to seven syllables. The persona, a fourteen-year-old female, uses terse, declarative sentences, speaking directly to her audience, making readers aware of her anxieties, her isolation, and her loneliness. She explains that she is in love with an immature boy who still sucks his thumb in private, that she is worried about her ashy knees and a skin that has “betrayed her,” and that she is occupied with death and...
[The entire page is 1484 words long]
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