"Hanging Fire" is characterized by short lines and a pretty straightforward vocabulary. The poem's speaker is a14-year-old girl, and hey, whaddaya know, the poem actually sounds like it's being spoken by a teenager. Our speaker jumps between topics a lot, and she complains and expresses her fears about typical teenager stuff—boys, braces—and also about the bigger, more important stuff in life: death, oblivion. With her short lines and lack of sophisticated sound patterns (we're looking at you alliteration and consonance), Lorde does an awesome job mimicking an adolescent voice—so much so that we can almost picture the teenage speaker, sitting on her bed, headphones on, Instagraming and gchatting with her friends. (The poem was written in the 1970s, way before Instagram of course, but hey, it's a free country and we like to use our imaginations.)