Analysis of "Dream Deferred" Dreams are the driving force of America today. Every person has some sort of dreams and or goals. Although in life everyone has dreams and goals, there are obviously more struggles for some ethnic groups than for others. The poem, "Dream Deferred," by Langston Hughes, is one man's expression of his dreams during a difficult time period. As a black man in a time period where African-Americans were considered an inferior group of people,dreams and goals would have been difficult to realize. Langston Hughes aptly expresses his frustrations in his poem, "Dream Deferred." As people read this poem, in any time period, they can relate to the simple universal message that the poet expressed. Hughes is very expressive in how he feels about dreams he has had and the factand his frustration at not being able to pursue and/or fulfill those dreams that he is unable to pursue or fulfill those dreams. In his poem, Hughes asks the reader to think by posing the question, “What happens to a dream deferred?”(1). This first line opens up a whole world of thought. Hughes was a man living in a difficult time period where such things as dreams were hard to come by, and those that a person did have were given little or no credit, much less opportunity to be fulfilled.[true] During his life, Hughes faced many challenges from a broken engagement to discrimination due to his skin color. He starts answering his question with various similes, each seeming to represent what could happen to various dreams. Hughes asks “Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”(2-3), signifying dreams that are so old they are hard to recognize, childhood dreams that flame up at one stage of life and at a later stage are still sweet to remember. Each subsequent line seems to focus on a different aspect of unfulfilled dreams, yet each one is typical of the time frame of Hughes' life. The words and phrases, “Or fester like a ...
