Exploding Dreams?

In Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” he begins by asking “what happens to a dream deferred?” Hughes starts the poem off with a question. As we read through the poem we notice that the majority of the poem is questions, all of which are rhetorical except the first one. The reason the first question is not rhetorical is because Hughes wants the reader to ask that question throughout the reading of the poem. The first question also serves the purpose of giving the reader context to what the following questions are referring to.

Hughes continues the poem with asking a series of four questions broken off in their own stanza. He puts these questions in their own stanza because they are all rhetorical questions asking similar things. The questions follow the order of, “Does it dry …. Like a raisin?... Fester like a sore?... Stink like rotten meat?... Crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?” With the exception of the last of the four questions, the order of the questions mimics situations in which something is gone for good. A dream that dries like a raisin in the sun in still there regardless of the fact shriveled and its appeal is gone. A dream like a festering sore is something very repulsive, a dream one wouldn’t want to touch, but with time a sore heals. Rotten meat, on the other hand, infers a dream that has gone completely bad and should probably be thrown away, but it still does exist no matter how disgusting it is. This progression also mimics a progression of time, a raisin dries quicker than a sore takes to fester, and a festering sore will cease before meat goes bad. Hughes organizes these three questions in this manner specifically to show the longer a dream exists, the more repulsive the dream becomes. Hughes finishes the stanza with the sugar question. Hughes uses this question to show that some people believe that the longer a dream exists, the more appealing it gets.
Hughes finishes the poem with one last question. This question is isolated in its own stanza and is also italicized. The question asks “…or does [the dream] explode?” Referring back to the progression above where the longer a dream exists the more gone it becomes, Hughes presents this question last because, in his opinion, dreams that exists for too long are irretrievable.

Directly before this question Hughes presents his only non-question in the poem. This immediate switch from statement to italicized question tells the reader that the last question plays the most importance in the poem. Furthermore Hughes is telling the reader that this rhetorical question is his own conclusion upon what actually happens to dreams deferred. And thus the reader can believe that Hughes’s opinion on dreams that remain unattained will be completely obliterated and destroyed.