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Dream Boogie Poem Analysis

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Langston Hughes’ poem, “Dream Boogie” dramatizes the double consciousness of an African-American. It shows that even during a time of happiness, such as the Harlem Renaissance, an African-American still experiences pain and despair due to the negative impact of race relations. The poem also depicts the limitations that include the inability to succeed one’s dream and the disappointment of not reaching equality. There are two speakers in the poem. The main speaker is well aware of his positon in life as an African American. He tries to get the listener to understand the reality of being an African-American, but the listener struggles to understand the oppression that African-Americans face.
The main speaker begins the poem by saying, “Good …show more content…

The second speaker who was also the listener interrupts and questions the main speaker about their thoughts on whether or not the beat is a happy beat. The listener may perceives jazz as literal happiness. These two lines stand alone to possibly stress that happiness is not the outcome of their current situation. The next stanza is critical to the meaning of the poem. In this stanza there is repetition. The main speaker again tells the listener to listen closely because the listener does not seem to understand the depth behind jazz and African Americans. This time the understanding speaker states “Listen to it closely:” The addition of the word “it” is emphasized to imply to the listener that they must listen to the beat thoroughly in order to truly understand that the sound is not a beat of happiness. The repetition continues and reflects stanza one. Lines 11-13 state, “Ain’t you heard something underneath like a -” The lines continue to characterize African Americans by using the southern accent. The speaker continues to stress the reality of an African-American in relation to a dream deferred to the listener. He implies that there is something deeper beneath the sound of those beats. Line 13 exemplifies another incomplete sentence. If one looks at the structure of stanza one and four together, it seems as if the words “dream deferred” should complete the sentence on line 13. The speaker maybe tried to complete the sentence and was interrupted again by the

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He explains that an African American man likes and does the same things as a white man, for instance when he says “Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life” (l 21-22). Society doesn’t view the truth that African Americans are the same as everyone else. The speaker states “I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like the same things other folks like who are other races” (L 25-26). He explains how he feels about other races in society viewing him as being different just because he is African American (l 34-36).

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He starts the second and third paragraph by saying “It is true.” This captures their attention. Green also references historical allusions that remind African Americans of the overwhelming amount of pain and lassitude they suffered in the past. By repeating the facts over and over to the African Americans, Green hopes that they realize they must put up a fight. In the fourth and fifth paragraph, Green repeatedly uses the terms “let us” and “brethren” as a way to call out to the African Americans and bind them together.

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He highlights his message to his audience by exampling a ship lost a see and whose sailors were dying of thirst. The only way they managed to survive was after they had listened to the advice of the skipper who told them to “cast down their bucket” into the sea and bring up the fresh water. This analogy exemplifies how blacks were also

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He says that the White think that African Americans want to be them and have their skin color and riches. But he portrays that they think wrong. He says in his appeal that the African Americans do not want to be their color because they know that they could not do the same harm as the whites did as of beating as they slowly die in the inside. He says that they have so much anger towards the white that the first thing that they would do is murder each and every one of them for the suffering that they bought on to their families of their kind. He would like to see them suffer the same way before they would ever become a white person.

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This part of the poem was interesting to me because I figured that it refers back to slavery because back in slavery blacks where unknown at this time. But now they

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It talks about how yesterday was a thing of the past and that it cannot be changed. He talks about how each day, African Americans must march on towards their dreams. Despite prejudice, oppression, and poverty that African Americans faced at this time, Hughes points to a positive in that the only way their dreams will come true is if they focus on the present day and what they can do to fix things. They cannot be looking at the past and what has happened. His message to the audience in this poem is towards the youth, in particular African-Americans.

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In the poem “Harlem” by Langston Hughes, several similes are used to portray the reality of dreams. Hughes employs effective metaphors, inviting us to visualize a dream and what may happen to it after it passes from conscious thought. Could a dream dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or even fester like a sore? (Hughes, 1951, p. 631).

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The language of the poem in the first stanza also depicts the setting of New York as a busy place with a lot going on at one time, “The sun is hot, but the/cabs stir up the air. I look/at bargains in wristwatches. There/ are cats playing in sawdust.” (11-14) The near-sporadic thinking of the speaker: having multiple thoughts in the same stanza that aren’t directly related and being written in short-enjambed sentences (creating breathlessness), creates a feeling of sensory overload which a city like New York is known

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Langston Hughes was an American poem born in the early nineteen hundreds, who became known as the leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He published many poems that brought light to the life of people of color in the twentieth century. There are three poems that the speakers are used to portray three major themes of each poem. Racism, the American Dream, and Hopes are all the major themes that Hughes uses to highlight the average life of a person of color. Theme for English B,” “Harlem,” and “Let America Be America Again” were three of Hughes’s poems that was selected to underline the themes.

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The final poem of significance is Jazzonia, in which Hughes experiments with literary form to transform the act of listening to jazz into an ahistorical and biblical act. Neglecting form, it is easy to interpret the poem shallowly as a simple depiction of a night-out in a cabaret with jazz whipping people into a jovial frenzy of singing and dancing. But, the poem possesses more depth, when you immerse yourself in the literary form. The first aspect of form to interrogate is the couplet Hughes thrice repeats: “Oh, silver tree!/Oh, shining rivers of the soul!” Here, we see the first transformation.

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