Sound & Sense 5

In Langston Hughes' "Harlem", countless similes are utilized to describe a "dream deferred" (1). According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of the word deferred is "1:withheld for or until a stated time" (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The main idea of the poem, therefore, is explaining what could possibly happen to a dream that is delayed or rejected. The structure and the positioning of the similes is what emphasizes the main idea of the poem. There are six images describing a dream deferred; five of these images are similes and one is a metaphor. The importance of the chain of similes one after the other is to develop the imagery in the poem. They are all used as questions to propose uncertainty about what could happen to a dream deferred. The shift in tone and in the use of literary devices occurs from line eight to line nine. Line eight ends with a question, whereas line nine is a statement. While the beginning of the poem which contains the similes has a descriptive and questionable tone, the last three lines have a foreboding tone. The metaphor is in the last line of the poem where the speaker says, "Or does it explode?" (11). This line stands out from the rest of the poem because it is not followed by a comparison. The fact that there is no explosion to compare to leaves the message to be interpreted in various ways.