to Luanda he describes as transforming. He says

when I saw the dust-green hills in the sunlight, something took hold of me inside. My Africa, Motherland of the Negro peoples! And me a Negro! Africa! . . . it was . . . the Africa I had dreamed about—wild and lovely, the people dark and beautiful, the palm trees tall, the sun bright.

In Europe, Hughes traveled, worked as a dishwasher, and met the distinguished African- American scholar Alain Locke, who invited him to submit his poems for publication in a special issue of Survey Graphic. Returning to New York, Hughes met a number of distinguished literary figures, won awards for his work, but had to continue working at menial jobs in hotels and restaurants in order to be able to live.

All of Hughes’s early experiences contributed profoundly to his poetry, and this is especially ap- parent in “Dream Variations,” which calls up a number of the poet’s early experiences in compressed form. As Hughes himself notes in The Big Sea, he was from a young age a dreamer, someone who sought to escape his present reality by being transported to other worlds through books. The present reality that was particularly disturbing to him was the racism that held his family in poverty. In the first stanza of “Dream Variations,” the speaker describes his dream and in doing so expresses that he wants to escape his present reality by being in a far-away place. He says, “To fling my arms wide,” to dance, to rest at nightfall—“that is my dream.” He is not only describing the dream he has, but explains that these things happening in the dream are what he wishes for. The sun conjures up an image of warmth and well-being as well as of life. The image of arms flung wide and dancing signifies a sense of freedom, happiness, and abandon. The tree seems to symbolize a sense of rootedness. When he announces “That is my dream,” the speaker makes clear that the things in his dream are what he longs for and also shows he is aware that his present reality is much different from the preferred state of things.

The poet, then, dreams of the things he did not and does not have as a child and young man growing up in the United States. He wants to be transported to a different place, where there is a sense of warmth and well-being that he did not experience as a Black American, where he feels rooted and secure, and where he can enjoy the freedom that is denied to him in his present situation. As he describes his dream, longing for a different type of life—one of happiness and freedom—Hughes calls up the social reality of the time and place he was growing up and shows its severe limitations. It is a place where he and his family struggled but could not enjoy the fruits of their labor because of the discrimination faced by every African American.

At the same time, Hughes suggests that there is a very real place where he can enjoy the things in his dream. The images he uses in the poem are strikingly similar to those he uses as he describes his initial impressions of Africa in The Big Sea. In “Dream Variations” the speaker dreams of dancing wildly in “a place in the sun” and of resting in the evening beneath a “tall tree,” which in the second stanza becomes a “tall, slim tree.” In his autobiography, Hughes finds Africa “wild and lovely” and comments on the brightness of the sun and the tall palm trees. He also thinks of Africa as the homeland of all people of African descent, admires the “dark and beautiful” people, and is struck by the fact that he is African like them. In “Dream Variations” the poet admires the night and is struck by the fact that he is dark and black like the night. By using certain key images, Hughes suggests in the poem a spiritual connection with Africa, the true homeland to him and other Black Americans because blackness there is celebrated and not condemned, and because in Africa happiness and freedom can be found.

But despite the fact that the poem celebrates and admires darkness and night, it shows light and dark, pale and black complementing each other and playing important roles in the speaker’s dream. The speaker is dancing in the sun, during the “white day.” He then rests at evening until dark night falls gently. In the second stanza, the speaker says he rests at “pale evening” before night comes tenderly. In both the stanzas, there is balance of white and black, dark and light. The white day, warmed by the sun, is a time for dancing. The pale evening is a time for rest. And black night falls to gently end the day. The speaker certainly identifies with darkness, blackness, and the night, but the poem makes clear that light and dark are important elements in his dream of well being. This sentiment, it could be argued, expresses Hughes’s understanding and insistence of the humanity of both Whites and Blacks. At an early age Hughes made friends with and understood the experiences of both White and Black Americans. He was profoundly aware of his own heritage of color and much of his life’s work was devoted to giving voice to particularly Black concerns, but he was cognizant of the dangers of all kinds of racism, whether directed at Blacks or Whites. “Dream Variations,” then, seems to indicate this mindfulness of the essential humanity of people of all backgrounds, Black and White, as the poet identifies strongly with darkness and blackness but shows both light and dark as important aspects of the speaker’s dream.

Hughes’s simple work, when examined closely in the context of the poet’s life and influences, has levels of meaning that make reading it a rich and rewarding experience. The use of the dream as a subject is particularly appropriate subject for a poem, as both dreams and poems invite interpretation through the use of imagination and knowledge. No doubt more detailed investigation of Hughes’s personality, interests, and life combined with creative interpretation of the poem’s ideas and symbols will yield further insights into this seemingly straightforward but interestingly complex poem.

Source: Uma Kukathas, Critical Essay on “Dream Variations,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002. Kukathas is a freelance writer and editor.

Langston Hughes became popular during a period in the 1920s commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance, a time when a number of black writers emerged in society. Unlike many of his peers, who focused on poems about middle and upper class blacks, Hughes strived to be the voice of the common African-American people. In one of his first poems, “Dream Variations,” Hughes imagines two African scenes of natural tranquility, which are a stark contrast to the oppressive, lower-class life most African Americans faced during this time period in “white” America. Through the poem’s imagery and pattern, Hughes emphasizes this contrast, leaving the reader with a sense that the inequalities that blacks face in white society are unnatural.

“Dream Variations” is a poem set in Africa, a place with which many African Americans have tried to identify, especially during the Harlem Renaissance. “Many of Hughes’s best early poems explored the nature of, and the beauty in, the African element of African American identity,” says David Roessel in American Writers: Retrospective Supplement.

Although “Dream Variations” depicts African scenes, it is also infused with overt black and white references that invoke the racial discrimination of 1920s America, and paint it as unnatural. This main polarity (or opposite)—black Africa as natural vs. white America as unnatural—is emphasized throughout the poem through the use of several differences in imagery and pattern.

The poem is divided into two stanzas, which feature extremely similar wording. It is the subtle differences in these words that give the poem its strong imagery. The most noticeable difference in image is the change from the first stanza to the second. In the first stanza, the persona—the voice that speaks to the reader in the poem—rests “beneath a tall tree,” while in the second stanza, through the use of a metaphor, the persona becomes the tree.

A close comparison of the two stanzas in the poem reveals that the tree, which represents nature, is the ideal to which the human persona in the first stanza strives. The first stanza begins as follows:

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.

With the exception of the first line, which is identical in both stanzas, the poet changes certain words in this four-line sentence from the first stanza to the second. In the second stanza, the first line changes from “In some place of the sun” to “In the face of the sun.” As a product of nature, the tree is more in touch with other aspects of nature, like the life-giving sun. Because of this, a tree is always “in the face” of the sun, while a human can only ever be in “some place” of the sun.

In the third line of the second stanza, “To whirl and to dance” from the first stanza gets upgraded to a much more emphatic “Dance! Whirl! Whirl!” When the persona is a tree, the dancing and whirling is more vibrant. This is a curious idea, because in the physical world, a human has more capability for movement than a tree. By giving the tree the greater freedom of movement within the context of the poem, Hughes demonstrates the fact that a tree with physical roots has more freedom than a black man in a white man’s society, which is supposed to be free.

One of the most striking differences comes in the change from “the white day” in the fourth line of the first stanza to “the quick day” in the corresponding line of the second stanza. Since days are not usually described as “white,” the word takes on a special connotation, or emotional meaning, within the poem. The days in the first stanza are “white,” because the black persona is in a white man’s world, and so is forced to view the world as white. But a tree, like other forms of nature, does not view the world in terms of black and white. Instead, the tree views the day by the passage of time. For a tree, one day in its long life would, in fact, be viewed as “quick.”

The imagery in the second half of each of the stanzas serves to further the idea of Africa as pure and natural. In both stanzas, night is viewed as a gentle or tender force, which is “dark like me” and “black like me,” respectively. The persona, both as a man and a tree, identifies with the color and comfort of the dark night, which symbolizes the protective quality of Africa. This is opposed to Hughes’s white world, where all things “black” or “dark” are looked upon with mistrust or seen as inferior.

These examples serve to illustrate the differences between the artificiality of humanity— especially as it existed in a racially oppressed America—and the purity of nature, as embodied by the ideal African homeland.

In other poems, Hughes lashed out at white America, using angry language to express his views toward racial discrimination. But with this poem, and certain others, he took a different approach to express his views. “Prejudice does not always stir Hughes to resentful poetic tones,” says James A. Emanuel in his entry for Twayne’s United States Authors Series Online. “He sometimes turns toward nature, toward innocent forms of life, to suggest that racial discrimination is a hybrid creature of man-made, aberrant principles.”

Hughes’s dream is to live in a world that embraces the simplicity of nature, as in the Africa of his heritage. This simplicity is also emphasized by the pattern of the poem. Nearly all of the words in “Dream Variations” are one-syllable words. The words are chosen for their ability to sum up a concept simply, so that the reader is left with a concrete image, without having to struggle with the difficult or unfamiliar words that some poets employ.

This simplicity is extended from the words themselves to the lines of the poem. The first eight lines of each stanza share the same end rhyme scheme, in most cases repeating the same end word from each line in the first stanza to its corresponding line in the second stanza. It is only the ninth and last line of the first stanza, “That is my dream!” that is missing from the second stanza. Many critics have commented on this conspicuous omission. Emanuel suggests that the ninth line in the first stanza “should have been removed,” while R. Baxter Miller, in The Art & Imagination of Langston Hughes, suggests that the top heavy structure with a long first stanza and shorter second stanza signifies “the possible dwindling of the dream” through the progression of the poem.

However, if viewed from a simplistic standpoint, the extra line in the first stanza serves to inform the reader that the persona is in fact dreaming, something that a reader would not know otherwise. So if this is the case, why is it not mirrored in the second stanza, as with all of the other lines? In the second stanza, the persona is living as a tree. If a reader is to assume that nature is the ideal, as Hughes goes to painstaking lengths to demonstrate, then the tree, a form of nature, is already living that ideal, and has no need to dream.

Other patterns in the second stanza support the notion that the persona is literally thinking like a tree. The fifth and sixth lines, “Rest at pale evening . . .” and “A tall, slim tree . . .” make deliberate use of an ellipsis at the end of each line, whereas in the first stanza, each corresponding line has no punctuation at all. As stated before, the subtle differences between corresponding lines in the two stanzas of this poem point to Hughes’s greater intentions. In poetry, ellipses introduce a pause into the reading, causing the reader to deliberately slow down and ponder the effect of the words. In this case, the use of ellipses signifies the deep, natural resting quality of the tree. This is unlike that of the human persona in the first stanza, whose rest is touched upon briefly but is not felt as fully by the reader.

This double pause in the poem sticks out even more due to the pattern of the remainder of the poem. Throughout “Dream Variations,” Hughes uses a line of action followed by a line of passive description. For example, look at the first four lines of the second stanza:

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.

In these lines, one can see how the first and third lines feature an active verb or verbs, while the second and fourth lines feature a passive description. This alternating pattern of action/description is repeated throughout, and it sets up a sing-song pattern, which causes the reader to race through the poem. If read according to the punctuation, a reader needs only halt for a long period of time at two points: the eighth line of the first stanza, “Dark like me—” and the double-pause of the tree’s rest, mentioned above. By tying these two points together through pauses, Hughes links the “dark” persona to the tree that is resting at pale evening, and the tree that is peacefully resting in the second stanza fulfills the dream of the “dark” human persona in the first.

In Hughes’s America, African Americans were denied the American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and many leaned toward their native Africa to find hope and the fulfillment of their dreams. In The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1, Arnold Rampersad noted that in this poem and other poems “written in Africa, Hughes responded emotionally to the most dangerous lies of European colonialism,” which promised all Americans that they could achieve their dreams. In the end, through his carefully crafted poem that uses specific differences in images and pattern, Hughes expresses his own dream: a life that mimics the freedom and colorblindness of nature, as idealized by his natural, African heritage. This is a stark contrast to the unnatural oppression and prejudice that Hughes and other African Americans faced in the white America of the 1920s.

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on “Dream Variations,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002. Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English and specializes in writing about various forms of literature.