Dream Deferred

"What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?"
"Dream Deferred"
Langston Hughes


This poem asks a lot of rhetorical questions--six to be exact. Hughes main point is..."What happens to a dream deferred?" What happens to a dream that we just put off and push aside? Hughes uses multiple similes to answer this question. He finds many possibilities as to what occurs when a dream is forgotten about. His first thoughts are that the dream will still remain present in someone's mind "fester like a sore," "stink like rotten meat" etc. but after time, it will "crust and sugar over," or it will start to fade. The dream may "sag" like a burden in one's mind. Once a dream has had sufficient time to fade from our lives, it may just "explode." The word explode implies that the dream will permanently be destroyed from our thoughts; it will cease to exist because it's been ignored for too long. At some point in time, a lifelong dream may eventually die off on its own, even if we may not realize it.