Langston Hughes wrote this poem in 1951, when he was becoming increasingly political in his poetry and increasingly under McCartney-era scrutiny for his left-wing politics.
Hughes knew Harlem in its vibrant heyday, during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, when he was first catapulted to fame. Later, he saw it—as white money invested in it disappeared during the Great Depression—become a place of poverty and despair. He asks in this poem how long black people living in Harlem can continue to defer, or put off, their dreams. As Martin Luther King would say a few years later, Hughes is arguing that blacks need a chance to succeed now, not in some distant future.
Hughes employs a figure of speech known as simile , a comparison that uses the words "like" or "as," to compare dreams deferred to a raisin drying up in the sun. This simile conjures a vivid image...
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in our minds. Raisins are already dry. They are essentially dehydrated grapes. For a raisin to dry further in the sun means it would lose all its juice and become hard and without taste. This image implies that black people have had their dreams shriveled and that a continuation of being denied opportunity will make that situation even worse. The raisin image sticks with us because we can visualize it, and therefore it reinforces the poem's message.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore
and then run?
Does it stink
like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?