The tone of “Hanging Fire” might best be described as anxious. The poem’s speaker is a fourteen-year-old girl who is clearly anxious about many things in her life. Her anxieties range from mundane matters related to romantic crushes and school dances, to more troubling matters related to premature death and her mother’s emotional withdrawal. Though these anxieties contribute to the overall tone, what’s more significant is the way the poem’s formal elements conspire to evoke the restless activity of the speaker’s racing mind. For example, consider Lorde’s use of enjambment (en-JAM-ment). Virtually all the lines in the poem are enjambed, meaning that each line flows directly into the next, without punctuation. This technique creates the feeling that the speaker’s thoughts are all running together anxiously, without separation. The running-together of the speaker’s thoughts indicates that there’s no linear development to her thinking. Instead, she ruminates on the same types of concerns and worries, and in each stanza she eventually circles back to the same image of her mother, withdrawn behind her closed bedroom door. This circling pattern allows Lorde to manifest the speaker’s anxiety in the overall structure of the poem.