Is It Worth To Dream?

Is it worth to have hope for a dream that might never come true? In our society people live from dreams, dreams that no matter the situation will always be a priority. But even if the desire to fulfill those dreams that are there in your soul and mind, not everyone has the opportunity or luck to make them true. Reality hits us everyday, and in a place such as Harlem, a very poor area in New York City where a community of African Americans live, this must be a thing they experience every single day. In Langston Hudge's poem, Harlem, he uses a series of rhetorical questions, which mainly ask the reader, "What happens to a dream deferred?" followed by questions that answer the first one. Hudges' tells us that that if a dream is delayed, it will dry up and become so little to be noticed anymore, or if the dream stays like a fester sore, hurting you permanently, getting what is best of you and creeping inside you until only pain remains. Or if it stinks like a rotten meat, a dream that a person starts to hate, because there is no hope for it, a dream that makes a person uncomfortable and unhappy because it is out of reach. But then Hudges' gives us a totally different image of what he had created before. He asks, "Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?" which in my case left me thinking that it was only a method to make the reader forget the disturbing images already made about a dream delayed. A dream deferred cannot be sweet, not even if that dream has lost its' meaning and does not matter anymore. Then Hudges' creates a depressing resigned tone when he says, "Maybe it just sags like a heavy load." which indicates that the dream that so much a person wanted to make true but never becomes a reality stays with them forever, making it harder to breathe, remaining like a heavy load in their shoulders as a reminder that it is still there, even if it will never be more than that; a heavy dream. Finally, Hudges' asks us, "Or does it explode?". The dream will either explode to make the person more miserable, or that person will explode in realization that he or she have to do everything in their power to make of that dream a reality. The tone changes throughout the poem, it goes from desperation, to resignation, to wonder. The similes used create images, that make us look at a dream in a different way, since a dream is not actually a thing , the author gives us examples of how would it feel to have a desired dream and not being able to make it true.