Poetic Analysis of Langston Hughes A Dream Deferred In the Historicism literary theory, one believes that a literary work

is always situated in the time when it is written. For instance, Leo Tolstoys novels like War and Peace and Anna Karenina are written in the heydays of the Romanov dynasty. His novels are marked with a distinct atmosphere of decadence and passage of time. On the other side of the world at a different time, Langston Hughes A Dream Deferred is also written with slight relevance to the current tide of events. Langston Hughes wrote from the Harlem Renaissance in the US. Getting in line with other writers like W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, it was not that much prestigious to belong in an array of honoured writers. During their time, they did not enjoy much freedom as what Blacks do today. His poem, A Dream Deferred , reflected a message that anybody of his stature mightve experienced. By denotation, deferred means postponed or delayed. On the other hand, dream has several different denotations. However, the poem would refer to a dream as an ideal or a desirable achievement. Hence, A Dream Deferred means a desirable goal or achievement delayed. With this title, there must be somebody attaining for something, and that attainment is delayed. The poem does not tell how it is delayed, but the voice of the poem tells of what comes out of a deferred dream. The poem was written with an unprecedented succession of images, all of which are symbolically compared to the Deferred Dream. The second part of the poem tells of four images, the raisin, sore, rotten meat, and syrupy sweet, as compared to that Deferred Dream. This montage is described as after a passage of time, like the drying of the raisin, or the rotting of the meat. Hence, initially the narrator thinks of the Deferred Dream as something that may rot away or dry up in time. On the third part of the poem, the image deviates from its main theme. Maybe it just sags/ like a heavy load. In these two lines lie the weight of the poem. The narrator is neither pessimistic nor hopeful of what comes out of the Deferred Dream. There is a turn of emotion that, at this point, nobody knows where it would go next. Maybe it could be another image to denote that a dream becomes useless when deferred after a passage of time. However, what gives it another meaning is the last line; or does it explode? The last line makes time an agent of implosion for the Dream to explode, to shatter in pieces from being a large, sagging load. In other words, as how a wine would ferment in time, a Deferred Dream may explode in time, and in the time where the narrator is in, an exploded dream means something. Thinking of it, at a time when you are set out to prove that you and your race exists, and you are among the front runners of that bid, losing hope because of how slow your plans move and give result is as good as a Deferred and exploded Dream. Harlem Renaissance was such a time. Hughes, and other leading writers of his time, surely fell into the same desperation at times. In the case of this poem, what was first a message of near desperation turned out to be a message that would still resonate for years to come as an inspirational poem for some.