Emotional Devices In Langston Hughes's Harlem

Langston Hughes wrote “Harlem” as a prediction of the upcoming clash African Americans would embrace in order to gain civil liberties. The poem also serves as a rallying cry to those pondering what to do with their frustration of the way blacks were treated in America before the civil rights movement. Hughes delivers an emotional appeal to readers, urging them to wake up and see the future of a people bursting with ambition but held back by discrimination. In the poem "Harlem" Hughes uses figurative language to powerfully convey the consequences of oppression which deny black Americans the dream of equality. Hughes uses similes, anaphora, alliteration, and metaphor to help the reader visualize and empathize with the plight of African Americans …show more content…
(lines 2-3)
These lines create the mental image of a piece of fruit transforming to a raisin baking in the heat, suggesting an oppressed person and their dreams morph into a different self, withdrawing from life and it 's challenges. Using a simile such as this enables the reader to place themselves in the shoes of an African American who is denied the ability to achieve their goals. It is not difficult to imagine what it feels like to have ambitions stifled like the heat robs the raisin of it 's water and therefore form. With imagery planted in the reader 's mind, Hughes proceeds to make effective use of figurative language by creating a rythym and therefore building the emotional punch of “Harlem” by the use of anaphora. The phrase “Does it” is repeated as an introduction to questions about the “dream deferred” as he creates momentum flowing from the images of the dream as “a raisin in the sun” to the dream having a “stink like rotten meat” (1-6). The effect of the repetition speeds the short poem and peaks the reader 's emotional interest in discovering what happens to the oppressed dream. By using anaphora as a tool to convey importance in the material written, Hughes places the emotion of urgency with the reader so that they may relate to the same feelings blacks have waiting for their own dreams to be realized in …show more content…
Prior to this point in the poem, Hughes has offered the reader the exact imagery of what oppression may look like, but at this point the poem changes as the reader is left to deal with the bomb of subjugation and make sense of what it personally implies for them. For a person struggling with like circumstances or for a person watching such struggles, it may provoke action. For others it may provide understanding as to why explosions take place when humans are treated unfairly. Hughes last sentence of the poem brings the reader into the dilemma of fighting for basic rights, he shows the reader that the only option is to take action as the other consequences are a miserable