“Dreams,” by the African-American poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967), is typical of Hughes’s poetry in the lucidity and simplicity of its style and in the clarity and directness of its meaning. The fact that the poem is so short is appropriate to its subject matter: as the very first line implies, dreams are often brief and difficult to retain. The “dreams” mentioned in that line, however, seem not so much to be those that come to us normally at night, when we are unconscious. Rather, the “dreams” that are the main subject of this poem are the hopes, ideals, and goals that can give daily life its meaning and
