Poem Analysis: As I Grew Older By Langston Hughes

505 Words2 Pages

As I Grew Older’ by Langston Hughes, it is about this character, his dream and how his dream was blocked out by a wall. Hughes set his poem up to tell the story of the characters life. First it’s telling you about how he was younger, and how his dream was right there without the wall and all of the sudden the wall starts to grow. Then it’s his life in the present, now the wall has grown up to the sky and is shadowing him. Then it talks about the future, how he wants to break through the wall and see his dream.

The wall could represent a lot of different things, if the character represented a community, the wall could represent the white community and how in that time there small mindedness or problems in the world that Hughes thinks needs to be addressed. In a more personal matter, it could represent the difficulties Hughes had to overcome while growing up. …show more content…

The ideas that I came up with all revolved around communities working together to create a peaceful environment for all skin tones etc.

It makes sense when you add equality and the problems, it’s easy to see what he is trying to portray when he was talking about the wall and the dream.

In the first section of Hughes’s poem it talks about the character when he was younger and his dream was right there in front of him. “Bright like a sun” is how the character describes it. Then the character says the wall started to rise between him and his dream. This could mean the white men are starting to cause problems.

And then the wall rose,
Rose slowly,

Open Document