How Did Langston Hughes Lose His Dreams In Life

Having seen the more melancholy, peaceful side of Hughes’ work on the subject of dreams in death, we find violent hope and yearning in his dreams for a better future. Throughout the Harlem Renaissance Hughes begins to bring the motif of dreams to the forefront of African American literature in a more positive, hopeful, light. Hughes’ work can be seen as a liminal period for African American literature, as the breadth of his work was produced not even sixty years after slavery was abolished, freedom for African Americans was still fresh. While legally free, African Americans were still alienated from their society at the hands of segregation. On one hand, Hughes uses the motif of dreams to express the negatives of living in this limbo stage, …show more content…
He asserts this by saying if you do let your dreams die, “life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly,” which the reader is not to take literally, but believe that their life will not go anywhere if they lose their dream. Since the living conditions afforded to black people at the time were far from luxurious, the only thing that can make those conditions bearable is to have hopes and dreams and have faith in change to come. He pleads that the reader must push past the hardships they face by focusing on their dreams. This is also illustrated in his poem “Mother to Son,” where his mother is the narrator recounting on her experience as a black women and how life had not been, but she encourages Hughes to push past obstacles with the motivation of his dreams. The diction in “Dreams”, while perhaps not terribly violent, is negative and denotes hopelessness (broken, barren, …show more content…
If one’s dream is put off, does that dream simply cease to exist, drying up one’s motivation to exist as well? Or does it fester in the mind of the person who has put off their dreams, constantly reminded that they are living a life not worth living without dreams, until it becomes too much for them? The images used to propose these questions are repulsive and uncomfortable, Hughes giving the reader that much more a reason as to not set their dreams aside. Hughes then proposes the idea that dreams deferred can “stink like rotten meat” or “crust and sugar over” being “syrupy sweet.” This gross imagery appealing to the readers taste and scent insists that there are no pleasantries in this life without a dream. He settles on the fact that perhaps the deferred dream just sags, a heavy load on the mind of the hopeless soul. He finishes the poem with a question he seems most intrigued to find an answer to. Does it explode? This is a more violent fate of the poor forgotten dream, and would arguably have a greater impact on the person who let go of their dream. Whereas his other questions imply that the dream will just die peacefully in its own rights, whether shriveling up or rotting, a dream exploding is more instantaneous and destructive. But since Hughes poses all of these questions it leads the