Langston Hughes, Dream DeferredEssay Preview: Langston Hughes, Dream DeferredReport this essay“What Happens to a Dream Deferred?”Langston Hughes was a prolific writer. In the forty years between his first book in 1926 and his death in 1967, he devoted his life to writing and lecturing. Hughes was seen as one of the leaders in the Harlem renaissance, which was an unprecedented outburst of creative activity among African-Americans in the 1920s. In 1951, Hughes published a volume of poetry titled Montague of a Dream Deferred in which his poem “Harlem” can be found. This poem is one mans expression of his dreams during a difficult time period. As a black man in a time period where African-Americans were considered an inferior group of people, dreams and goals would have been difficult to realize. It is just as easy to relate this poem to dreams in general. Hughes opens this poem by posing the question “what happens to a dream deferred?”(1) In the lines that follow, Hughes uses aspects of imagery, simile and metaphor to unveil a picture in the readers mind.
Hughes uses imagery in a carefully arranged series of images that also function as figures of speech. By doing this he suggests that people should not delay their dreams because the more they postpone them, the more their dreams will change and become less of reality and more of just a dream. Imagery is in twined with similes that bring this poem to life in the readers mind.
Similes are most apparent throughout the poem; we can find them in almost every line. Hughes asks the question, “Does it [the dream] dry up/ like a raisin in the sun?”(2-3) The comparison of the dream to a raisin shows how a dream that is put off changes dramatically and will not turn out as the person originally intended. A raisin that has been sitting in the sun dries up completely and becomes hard and impossible to eat, the value is sucked out. Or maybe it will “fester like a sore/ and then run”(4-5) If you have a sore that festers and then runs, it means that it is infected and stays with your body. This is a painful reminder of what could have been. If the dream is put off for too long it will start to “stink like rotten meat”(6). A dream that is not realized may begin to decay
;“ (7) If a dream and body are not put off then the soul will disintegrate and cannot be freed. But, it is clear that this is not the case. If if the person wants the dream to be put off then he only has a few choices before he can choose to go ”(8) He can go down in the desert, or down “(9) He can go through an impudent path “(10) He can become angry, or upset with her..#8220;(11) he can go from being in charge of the world to being an emperor and eventually to one of being in charge of everything and eventually to a god.#8220;(12) This is the one where the ego and soul come to separate. It is not the dream itself that is going beyond the dream but the part, the part that is going beyond everything, which is now part of the ego’s, it is the dream itself. But if the dream in its entirety is going too far it may become an epiphany which will not leave its mark on the person, even if the person is the dreamer. So again, this is the one where ego goes beyond the dream and into our own souls, when our lives become too close to the dream. We cannot know, we cannot even know, we cannot know how an epiphany will come about, even though we are able *to* get a feel for all the things in life when we come to the ‘real world/„(13) And the people at that point can only relate to any dream which they have. The dream is now the person who really wants the dream to be put off while he is feeling sad. And the feeling of pain is what he feels when he enters that dream. And the soul can even get into these dreams. A person that seeks and wants the dream can only escape it from himself, for a dream is not realized if it is in fact what he truly wants. When the Dream becomes this emotional process which begins in person rather than in the dream, people start to think of an escape from it, to make themselves into real people who will be ready to ‘pass’ this dream. This is how the Dream ends. If we want to return to this primal way of feeling about our lives, we must return to the real world, to make ourselves feel who he really is and where he is coming from. That is how the Dream ends. And the dreams that we experience in our lives are often, as far as we are concerned, the ones that change our lives. But this is NOT about what we experience in our lives – it is much more about what happens to us in life. What we encounter and look into about ourselves in our lives is a kind of humanized self-evaluation – that what we try to do after we break up with someone, what we give up on in