Dream Deferred

# 10/11

This poem has some very interesting imagery. Five of the six images are similes. The last image, "Or does it explode?" is a metaphor. Langston wants to give the reader a mental image of what will happen when a dream is put off and pushed aside. I think it is very important that the first four images are posed as rhetorical questions to the reader. Hughes is trying to make his audience see this image and visually imagine what will happen if people do not act upon their dreams. One will keep thinking about their dream and it will start to bug them. Also, once the prime time for the dream to be put in action passes, the chance for change and new experience is lost. Maybe it will even start to become sugarcoated and bring the dreamer down. Maybe, just maybe, it will explode and affect everyone around it and associated with it.

The End

"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned god time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. "Yes" I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?" (pg. 251)

The end of the book was very confusing to me. Jake cares about Brett so much that she could me 1,000 miles away and I am sure a telegram with ten words on it asking him to come to her, and he leaves right away. She won't give Jake the time of day because he can't have sex with he, but whenever she needs him, he is there. I think Jake likes being needed. He likes to dream about what they could have.

This last quotation of the book didn't make much sense to me, so I went to sparknotes to see if that would help. It said there was a meaning behind the policeman stopping the cab. Brett needs to stop dreaming of what could've been because it will never happen. Why focus on the past when it can't be changed?

I think the one thing I actually understood about the ending was that Jake is torn and internally sad because he really did love her once, but for reasons he had no control over, she wouldn't be with him.