Dreams' VS 'Harlem' by Langston Hughes: Meaning and Comparison
'Harlem' and 'Dreams' are two poems written by famous African American poet Langston Hughes. In 'Harlem' by Langston Hughes the meaning that the autor tried to evoke was the image of a deferred dream which was dying slowly. But in his creation 'Dreams' the poet tells us how important a dream is for someone’s life and analyzed how miserable our life would be without them. The poem 'Harlem' has four stanzas whereas Dream has two.
The first stanza of 'Harlem' starts with a rhetorical question to provoke thoughts in our mind about what really happens when a dream gets postponed. The 2nd stanza of 'Harlem' tells us how Our 'Dreams' start to stink, get faded, crust over or finally it explodes – all these similes suggest a how a dream slowly approaches towards denouement. One the other hand, in the first stanza of the poem 'Dreams', the poet has explained to us how absence of 'Dreams' can make our lives undesired. He used the metaphor “bird” which is a symbol of freedom or hope and explained to us if we stopped dreaming we would lack joy & happiness in our lives.
The third stanza of the poem 'Harlem' ends with a full stop which is different from the other two stanzas and it gives us some sort of positivity. Although the word “heavy road” means burden but history has always showed us how some people have turned it into possibility. Finally, the last stanza of this poem does not have any definitive answer which means the answer can be both positive or negative depends on our way of thinking.
Again, in the second and last stanza of the poem 'Dreams', the poet again remined us to hold onto our 'Dreams' and used another metaphor “barren field with frozen snow” to explain us the deep meaning. Barren field represents field without crops which represent fruitfulness of life – he told us that people who let their 'Dreams' go never become productive in their lives and they lack motivation to do something better for themselves or others.
So, after analyzing both poems we can say that both poems have one thing in common which is “dream”. The poem 'Harlem' represents a dream that gets faded away with the passage of the time whereas the poem 'Dreams' depicts the positivity by keeping 'Dreams' alive. What Langston Hughes has portrayed in his poem 'Harlem' is the 'Dreams' of African Americans. They couldn’t dream about greater things back then because of the oppressive environment around them. But in the poem 'Dreams' he wanted to give them a positive message by telling us to stick to our 'Dreams'. The poet has personified 'Dreams' as a living thing and it will get vanish if we are not really determined to keep them. It makes us vulnerable as we are letting go the possibilities of bigger goods.
