Question

What feeling do the speakers in “Hanging Fire” and “Teenagers” share about the image of a closed door? Use evidence from the poems to support your answer.

Answer 1

Both poems use the term "closed door" to show the divergence between the ideals of teenagers and adults.

Step-by-step explanation:

In the poem "Hanging Fire" the term "closed door" is used to describe how adults are oblivious to the concerns and thoughts of teenagers. That's because in the poem, the speaker, a teenager, shows all his worries about his life, the day he will die, his clothes, his notes and his achievements. The speaker shows how worried he is, ends his thoughts with the phrase "and momma's in the bedroom with the door closed", showing how his mother lives in another world, focused on other thoughts and oblivious to the adolescents' concerns.

In the poem "Teenagers", the term "closed door" is used to describe how teenagers tend to get caught up in their own thoughts and not share them with adults, keeping everything to themselves. This can be seen in the lines:

"One day they disappear

in your rooms.

Doors and lips closed

and we become strangers

in our own home. "

With that, we can conclude that the two poems use the same term to describe the adolescents' ability to be trapped in their own thoughts and the adults' ability to remain alien to the adolescents' thoughts.