Hi, I need help with essay on Poetry of Langston Hughes. Paper must be at least 2000 words. Please, no plagiarized work!Download file to see previous pages... The "dream deferred" is the dream of oppo

Hi, I need help with essay on Poetry of Langston Hughes. Paper must be at least 2000 words. Please, no plagiarized work!

The "dream deferred" is the dream of opportunity in America that, Hughes argues, has been denied to his fellow African-Americans. An interesting point that is rarely raised in the numerous discussions of this poem is that "deferred" implies that the dream has not been permanently denied to black people, but rather delayed. The "dream", which may sensibly be regarded as "the American Dream" found within Jefferson's vision of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (Jefferson, 1785) has been denied to African-Americans and Hughes, in characteristically direct manner, asks the simple but profound question "what happens" when it is denied.

The comparison of a black person to a "raisin in the sun" is a remarkably evocative image. First there is the very literal physicality of the image: of a wrinkled piece of fruit becoming even more wrinkled under a blazing sun. The various possible fates for this "raisin" (African-American) are rather dire and stress very direct, again physical imagery. Thus the idea of it festering and running like a sore is complemented by the image of a rotten peace of meat. The only possibility actually given by Hughes is that perhaps it just sags like a "heavy load". It is interesting to note that the actual possibility provided is far less graphic than the questions posed, and yet, most profoundly imagines the raisin becomes almost like a slave weighed down under a load.

If nothing changes, then the dream may actually "explode". The sense that the raisin (black people) will not be destroyed, will not shrivel up in the heat, fester like a boil or stink like rotten meat, but rather will explode into what may be assumed is violence is a logical conclusion to the poem. The questions are rhetorical up to the last one that is deliberately set off from the others through the use of italics.

In Song for a Dark Girl more questions are raised, and once again Hughes leaves them poignantly unanswered. While it is called "Song for a Dark Girl" it might more accurately be called "Song by a Dark Girl" (Walker, 2005). In three short and simple stanzas Hughes paints the picture of a tragic story and a question that has apparently never been satisfactorily answered. Thus "Way Down South in Dixie" the girl says that "they hung my black young lover/To a cross roads tree." The second stanza repeats the first line and then links the lynched black man to Jesus in the parenthetical line in a brilliantly simple manner:

(Bruised body high in air)

I asked the white Lord Jesus

What was the use of prayer.

(Hughes, 1995)

The "bruised body high in air" is both the body of the black man hanging form the tree and that of Jesus hanging from the cross. This may be an even denser image as Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, is said to have hung himself from a tree.