“What happens to a dream deferred?” Is the question posed by the infamous Poet, activists, novelist, and playwright Langston Hughes in his 1951 poem by the name of Harlem or Dream deferred. In the poem, Hughes straightforwardly flings us a question, in which at first seem pretty simple in meaning but as you continue to read the concept becomes more and more complex and profound. The telling reader to pursue after their dream or the dream will soon disappear, an inspirational theme in which Hughes display in several of his works. Harlem uses clear-cut use of literary elements such as Metaphor, Speakers, Imagery, and Rhythm to describe just how 1950’s Harlem community perceived and valued their dream through the eye of Hughes. His approach was …show more content…
Its use of metaphoric images is there in a sense to familiarize the audience with how the author identifies a deferred or put of dream. The use of metaphor helps provides the poem’s structure and gives it a blunt tone. An example of this would be line 4 where he describes the dream as “Fester like a sore” (493). This particular metaphor is blunt because everyone can identify with what a sore is and the negative assumptions associate with sores such as painful, irritable, or even rotten out. Similar to line 4 are lines 10 and 11 where Hughes states, “Maybe it just sags like a heavy load?”(493) giving the audience the impression that a deferred dream can be a burden or weight on a person’s life and maybe interfere with other portions of everyday life. Metaphoric uses like these can be found on every other line in this poem and I think the reason for that is to mainly assure that the readers confidently comprehends and see the direction Hughes want to take your attention but he still leaves enough opportunity for you to draw your own views from each circumstance. He does an excellent job of …show more content…
Phrase like “stink like rotten meat” and “or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet” are remarkable examples of figures of speech because their use in not a literal sense yet they give you the depiction as what he means by each line. ‘Fester like sore” would also fit under this category. Fester, being the visual word, provokes images of pus and irritating, the whole phrase plays huge part as to contributing to the descriptions of the texture and visual of the sore or what the sore represents (the dream) also the understanding of the poem. Both the imagery and figure of speech forms used were intense yet simple enough to give the poem a lighter, not too serious feel than maybe some of Langston’s other works but still just as substantial if not
It can cause one to become hopeless and think that it might not ever happen. One can be lead to thought that since Hughes is an African American he can not achieve his dreams due to the society that holds him back. One can see all throughout the poem Hughes uses words that perfectly describe a deferred or delayed dream. Hughes uses words like “fester”, “explode”, “sugar over”, “dry up” and “stink”. One can see that all the words describe a dream deferred in a negative and violent manner.
Langston Hughes was a large influence on the African-American population of America. Some of the ways he did this was how his poetry influenced Martin Luther King Jr. and the Harlem Renaissance. These caused the civil rights movement that resulted in African-Americans getting the rights that they deserved in the United States. Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was young and his grandmother raised him. She got him into literature and education; she was one of the most important influences on him. He moved around a lot when he was young, due to his parents divorce, but remained a good student and graduated high school. After this he traveled the world and worked in different places, all the things he saw in his travels influenced him. In 1924 he settled down in Harlem where he became one of the important figures in the Harlem Renaissance. He enjoyed listening to blues and jazz in clubs while he wrote his poetry. The music that he enjoyed greatly influenced the style and rhythm of his poetry. The poem “Dream Variations” by Hughes is about an average African-American who dreams of a world where African-Americans are not looked at or treated differently and they can rest peacefully. Yet in real life this was not so, black people and white people were not equal. And the world was not as forgiving and nice as in their dream. This poem is a good example of Hughes writing because it is typical of three things. The first is the common theme of the average life of an African-American and their struggles. Secondly, the style of his writing which is based on the rhythm of jazz and blues- he uses a lot of imagery and similes. Lastly, his influences which are his lonely childhood and growing up as an Afric...
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement during the 1920s and 1930s, in which African-American art, music and literature flourished. It was significant in many ways, one, because of its success in destroying racist stereotypes and two, to help African-Americans convey their hard lives and the prejudice they experienced. In this era, two distinguished poets are Langston Hughes, who wrote the poem “A Dream Deferred” and Georgia Douglas Johnson who wrote “My Little Dreams”. These two poems address the delayment of justice, but explore it differently, through their dissimilar uses of imagery, tone and diction.
A good example would be when the mother in the story talks about her life using a metaphor of a staircase. In the beginning of the poem, the mother says, "Well, son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It’s had tacks in it, And splinters, [...] But all the time, I’se been a-climbin’ on" (Hughes lines 1-9). This metaphor describes the mother's life experience, the reader can infer was hard, but the nice part of this excerpt is the final lines, where the metaphor of continuing to climb on the staircase is used to symbolize the mother's goal to persevere, no matter how tough life gets because she believes her efforts will accomplish something good.
In the poem, it says, “ Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun?”. Since they are comparing two dissimilar things using “like” or “as”, it is a simile. In “Harlem Night”, there is imagery. In the poem, it says, “Moon is shining./Night sky is blue./Stars are great drops/Of golden dew” (Hughes 7-10). There is nice, descriptive images.
This poem is much more vague in the way Hughes chooses to state his dream. The poem opens by stating: “To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun To whirl and to Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently, (Variations lines 1-9) Here Hughes is stating how he wishes he could be free without a care in the world.
In his poem “The Weary Blues” Langston Hughes’ is written in free verse to mimic the patterns of natural speech and music. This poem, as the title suggests, focuses on the blues, a musical style invented for the expression of deep pain; Blues songs are typically performed by individuals to create a feeling of loneliness in the grief-stricken lyrics. Hughes’ verse creates a natural rocking to the somber tune as the musician rocks on his stool; the speaker describes the song as “melancholy”. Interestingly “melancholy” describes the ending of the poem perfectly. As the musician thumps his foot and Hughes repeats that beat the singer sleeps like a dead man. Simply by communicating through music with ...
“Harlem” by Langston Hughes is a poem that talks about what happens when we postpones our dreams. The poem is made up of a series of similes and it ends with a metaphor. The objective of the poem is to get us to think about what happens to a dream that is put off, postponed; what happens when we create our very own shelve of dreams? The “dream” refers to a goal in life, not the dreams we have while sleeping, but our deepest desires. There are many ways to understand this poem; it varies from person to person. Some may see this poem as talking about just dreams in general. Others may see it as African-American’s dreams.
In Langston Hughes’ poem, the author gives us vivid examples of how dreams get lost in the weariness of everyday life. The author uses words like dry, fester, rot, and stink, to give us a picture of how something that was originally intended for good, could end up in defeat. Throughout the play, I was able to feel how each character seemed to have their dreams that fell apart as the story went on. I believe the central theme of the play has everything to do with the pain each character goes thru after losing control of the plans they had in mind. I will attempt to break down each character’s dream and how they each fell apart as the play went on.
What is a dream deferred? Is it something children imagine and lose as they grow up. Do dreams ever die, as we find out, the world is it what it seems. The play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry and Harlem by Langston Hughes talk about dreams deferred. It shows a African American family struggling to make their dreams a reality. Although Walter, Ruth, Mama, and Beneatha live in the same house, their dreams are all different from each other.
As a leader in the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties Hughes became the
Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in "Montage of a Dream Deferred." His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period—Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen—Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.
Hughes, Langston. "Harlem (A Dream Deferred)." Literature and the Writing Process. Elizabeth McMahan, Susan X. Day, and Robert Funk. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River. Prentice, 2002. 534.
In the poem Langston Hughes uses a range of illusions, rhetorical questions, figurative language and
...and organization provided the reader with a good quality work. The diction and repetition Langston Hughes used gave the reader the importance of the poem. The tone and organization gave the reader how to understand the poem to get the full knowledge out of it. However, what was interesting in the poem, Let America Be America, is how Langston Hughes used the information he provided because if you read carefully he talked about immigrants from Poland, Ireland, and England. Langston Hughes implied that he was the immigrants, in paragraph 8, but in a way that they are his friends. From this, the reader can judge Langston Hughes as a person who was thinking about others not just himself and wanted the dream, he wanted so bad, shared with everyone. Making the reader realize that with unity one will accomplish anything and never be greedy with what you want, always share.