Harlem Explication

Langston Hughes was a writer during the Harlem Renaissance. The name represents the movement, although at the time it was not called the Harlem renaissance, this literary movement of black culture into pop culture created a new, or rather, different respect for black culture. The poem is made up of rhetorical questions, suggesting the narrator’s questionable attitude towards this movement. Or maybe the opposite; that the author finally will get his chance to make his “dream deferred” come true. Hughes uses many similes including the infamous “like a raisin in the sun”, which suggests that the “dream deferred” could be put off too long. That, like a raisin, it will dry up, losing all its pizzazz. Using the comparison to other food, “rotten meat” and “syrupy sweet” suggests that one’s talent and dreams have a critical period of which they are ripe or well, but after that they may become “rotten” or “crust and sugar over”.

By saying it might “just [sag] / like a heavy load” could be meant to say it drags one down. It could even mean that not achieving ones dream can cause a sense of depression. This is its own stanza toward the bottom of the poem and is secured by a period, the only period in the poem. All this further symbolized the weight of a “dream deferred”.

This could have occurred for many black artists before the time period however, during the Harlem renaissance, their deferred dreams could be made into a reality and “explode” much like Langston Hughes’.  This last rhetorical question suggests a hopeful outcome, unlike the previous part of the poem which was quite bleak. It could also be interpreted as negative, that the dream was built up for so long that when it comes to a head, it “explode[s]” which could result in calamity. However, I interpret it in a positive way, in which Hughes gives hope to other artists chasing their dreams, for the Harlem Renaissance was the ultimate time for blacks to display their talents.