Hanging Fire

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Rhyme

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Literary Devices Rhyme

Since Lorde wrote the poem in free verse, “Hanging Fire” doesn’t make special use of rhyme. When we recall that the speaker is a teenage girl whose thoughts are anxiously flowing through a list of insecurities, the poem’s lack of rhyme seems appropriate. Concerned as she is about the difficulties of her life, it’s fitting that she wouldn’t take the time to craft her complaints using a rigid meter; nor would she decorate her thoughts with strict rhyme. In this way, the absence of rhyme helps establish the stream-of-consciousness effect of the speaker’s racing mind, since the language doesn’t draw undue attention to itself. If there is any rhyme at all in the poem, it takes a very dedicated ear to detect it. For instance, there’s a possible rhyme in lines 3–7:

the boy I cannot live without
still sucks his thumb
in secret
how come my knees are
always so ashy

The word “thumb” and “come” do form a perfect rhyme. However, the rhyme occurs between one word that comes at the end of a line and a second word that comes in the middle of another line. As such, it has an accidental quality and can easily go unnoticed.

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