Dream Deferred

[Question 6]

So the purpose of this poem was to encourage other African Americans to move forward with gaining equality, which is the dream in the poem.

The dream can shrivel. It loses all it's good stuff. (Like a grape that turns into a raisin) No one wants to deal with nasty raisins. Once the dream shrivels, no one wants to deal with it.

Or it festers like a sore.. which is just nasty to think about. When you don't do anything about your goals, they are constantly on your mind, until you go crazy.

It could also stink like rotten meat. If African Americans had just let themselves be treated like dirt forever, the problem would have grown into an even worse problem, and there would be no way to fix it. You can't make rotten meat pink again (Unless you are the Piemaker).

They couldn't just keep making excuses to put off solving the problem. Everything can seem "sweeter" when we deny that anything is wrong.

The dream will never leave your conscience if you don't do anything about it.

Langston Hughes warned his fellow African Americans that if they don't do something about the way they were being treated, it will turn violent.