The Girl Alfred Lorde Summary

The poem opens with a fourteen-years-old girl. She worries about her small issues such as learning how to dance, being on Math Team, wearing braces to a bigger issue such as death. The main point of the poem focuses on the girl wanting to die and worries if her mother would abandon her. The girl is scared if she dies without her mother noticing. She also scared that she can’t attend her graduation. This poem is an example of lyric poetry because it makes the readers feel the emotions that the little girl experience when she thinks about death while she is still young. Her attitude towards the subject of the poem is uncertainty in regards to her teenage life. The tone of the poem makes the readers feel loneliness because the girl is isolated from her mother. The little girl wants to talk to her mother about her life issues but her mother is always in the bedroom not
The form relates to the content of the girl’s life issues. Lorde uses enjambment – run-on line to express the girl’s loneliness, the inability to talk to somebody; especially to her mother about her secrets, concerns and issues that she kept hidden so long. She wants other people to feel and understand her hardships that she has been through. Lorde chose free form because she wants to make the readers feel like the teenager girl and put themselves into the girl’s situation and think how hard it is to live while no one care for her. This poem has three stanzas and each stanza is a run-on sentence that has 11 or 12 lines. Each of the lines are short and simple. Most of the lines are less than seven words. Lorde uses only three periods at the end of each stanza. The punctuation is not always coinciding with the end of the poetic line. Lorde uses the phrase “Hanging Fire” as a metaphor of the adolescence that relates to the little girl’s teenage life – a hard time from childhood to adulthood that she wants to find an escape