Never Stop Dreaming - Langston Hughes

Assignment 1

There’s a saying, “Never stop dreaming’ but for Langston Hughes; it took courage to even start. As for the African American people of his time. Langston started to dream, he wished to fly. But his dreams were destroyed and he was left with a scar. Did he stop dreaming?

Langston Hughes was a black American poet when black people were oppressed. All they had is a dream; the dream to be free. Langston wished to be free too. So, he wrote the poem "Dreams". He gave much importance to keep the dream alive in his people. It was written in 1926. The poem has two stanzas divided with 4 lines in each stanza. There are 2 cases of alliteration, ‘For if dreams die’ and ‘Life is a broken-winged bird'. Life is compared with a broken-winged bird as a metaphor. A bird flies in the sky with no oppression, the whole sky is his. He is free and independent. But when his wings are broken, he is helpless and can't be free anymore. Without dreams, life has compared with the barren field and snow. The barren field is unproductive land and snow symbolizes lifelessness. Langston meant without dream life has no use and it loses its true meaning.

In the year 1951, Langston wrote "Harlem". The poem talks about the deferred dreams. It has four stanzas. The first stanza is a one-line rhetorical question. The second stanza consists of lines from 2-8. The third stanza is from 9-10. The last stanza is a line metaphor. The use of alliteration is shown in the respective lines, "What happens to a dream deferred?”; “Does it dry up? And “like a syrupy sweet”. Similes are used by comparing deferred dreams to a raisin and a fester, crust and sugar, syrupy sweet, and heavy load. Raising in the sun, fester like a sore, stink like rotten meat, crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet, sags like a heavy load, does it explode used as metaphors in the poem Harlem.