The Forgotten Dream in A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes

Although Langston Hughes’s poem “A Dream Deferred” may look small and basic at first glance, there are many hidden meanings significant to the poem’s important meaning. First of all, what one may initially notice is the odd format of the poem. One line is essentially asking the question of “what happens to a dream deferred?” and the lines below it, all indented, offer some possible explanations. Finally, this poem closes off with one final possible answer in italics questioning whether the dream deferred “explodes”. When offering possible explanations, Hughes uses similes when describing all his explanations aside from the last one. Furthermore, all the similes provided compare the explanation of what happens to a dream deferred to food. This is done because activities such as cooking and eating are part of an everyday experience. Ultimately, it is Hughes’s goal here to help the reader see that staying on track with one’s dreams is just as essential to life as cooking or eating. Just like if people do not eat, failing to follow one’s dreams will lead life to be unsatisfying. In short, Hughes’s goal in this poem is to have his readers see the importance of keeping your dreams alive and not abandoning them. In fact, Hughes’s poem is commonly associated with Harlem since the dream for Harlem had been progressing just fine until the Great Depression when chaos ensued and people forgot what the dream for Harlem had been. Hughes uses this poem as a wake-up call to alert the people of Harlem (and even people in general) that if they continue to delay their dreams, their quality of life will worsen and there will never be any satisfaction. The speaker of this poem appears as if it is an intelligent professor who challenges hi...

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...how beautiful I am and be ashamed”. On the other hand, “A Dream Deferred” seems dark and depressing as it discusses the negative outcomes of what happens to a dream deferred. Rather than there being something to look forward to, Hughes brings the possibility of something happening that most people would want to put off, such as something disgusting or an explosion. It can be argued that in these particular poems, the failure of one event led to the next. When “I Too” was written in 1945, Hughes believed that there will be a day soon where race would not matter as much as it once did at the time he published this poem. However, when Hughes notices how racial equality was not get any better (and was in many cases getting worse), he wrote “A Dream Deferred” in 1951 to reflect how the goal for racial equality, (among other things) had been forgotten and overlooked.