The poetspeaks about the advice that speaker's father has bestowed upon him/her in childhood. The advice given by the father was to be silent. The literarydeviceused in this line is connotation.
In “Hanging Fire” Lorde's focus is on several issues that confront the teenager within the poem and affect teenagers in the extended world: the preoccupation with death, the problem of living in a sexist society, and the fear of isolation within the home
