The speaker of "Life Doesn't Frighten Me" begins this poem with lots of bravado. She starts by naming a couple of classic bedtime terrors: "shadows on the wall" and "noises in the hall." But neither of these scary things, she says, frighten her the least little bit—and nor does "life" itself. This will be a poem about the way that children find the courage to face a genuinely scary world.
The poem's first four stanzas all use the same shape: over the course of three lines, the speaker lists two scary things, then returns to her refrain: "Life doesn't frighten me at all" (or a slight variation, like "They don't frighten me at all"). And all those stanzas also use similar punchy, up-front rhythms. Listen to the sounds of the second stanza:
Bad dogs barking loud
Big ghosts in a cloud
Life doesn't frighten me at all
All these lines start with strong stresses, making the speaker sound forceful. And the parallel sentence structure of the first two lines of each of these stanzas makes it seem as if the speaker could go on listing scary things all day—and then scoffing at them. She sounds like one tough cookie.
But maybe she needs to make herself sound tough. In the first two stanzas, she's listed all kinds of terrifying things, from mysterious shadows and sounds to imagined "ghosts" in clouds to very real "bad dogs." The world, this poem already suggests, is a scary place for kids! Real and imaginary monsters lurk everywhere.
The speaker's refrain thus makes her sound as if she might be putting on a bold face—"whistling in the dark," as Maya Angelou herself puts it. The speaker might claim she never feels frightened, but she sure has a detailed list of everything that could seem scary!