Sunday, October 18, 2009

Dream a Little Dream of Me


Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today. -James Dean

Another renowned poet that I have yet to share with my fellow bloggers is Langston Hughes. The first time I became familiar with the work of Langston Hughes was during a poetry unit sophomore year. My class analyzed his poem “Theme for English B” and I found his work to be very refreshing and different than the other works we had read. He is probably one of the most renowned black poets for his time. Not only did he work magic when writing he was one of the first poets to experiment with jazz poetry. I was looking through an archive of his works and found this very pleasant poem called “Dreams.”

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Though it is a fairly short poem it manages to hold a lot of meaning in its words about dreaming. Langston Hughes was also a very technical writer and poet. This poem reads so easily because of his ability to take technical skill and create an easy flow in his poetry. In this essay Langston Hughes describes the importance of dreams and that you must dream or your life will have no meaning and you might as well be dead if your life has no meaning. Hughes uses two very interesting analogies to represent a life with no dreams; he relates not holding tight to your dreams to a bird that cannot fly and frozen dirt laden with snow. Using both of the analogies, it can be stated that Langston believes that a person’s dreams are what give people the urge to live and without them people have nothing to pull themselves up from whatever mess they were given. I think this message is easy to understand when you look back on Langston Hughes childhood which was not very easy for him but he obviously managed to come out of the mess and become a successful poet that was influenced by the troubles of his early childhood.

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