The Figurative Language Used In A Dream Ferred By Langston Hughes

“All our dreams can come true if we have enough courage to pursue them.” said Walt Disney. If you doubt yourself just once, that feeling will hang over your head and you may never accomplish what you wanted. His constant use of literary devices, connotation, and figurative language shown by similes. Langston Hughes urges that a dream dismissed will stubbornly fade away in his poem “A Dream Deferred”. Hughes uses rhetorical questions to reveal what he believes happens to a dream lost. In particular, Hughes questions “Does it fester like a sore- and then run?”(Hughes 3,4). A festering sore has to get a lot worse before it can get better. It has to grow and cause more pain and just sit there on your body until it pops. Your dream is that sore,

That moment when it pops is your dream officially going away forever. He questions it because every sore is different like how everyone has a different dream that they could be avoiding. He wants you to know what will happen but he just doesn’t know the specifics of your dream. Additionally, at the end of his poem, Hughes asks, “Does it explode?”(Hughes, 10). After anything explodes there is no way you can get it back to its original form even if you spend every hour of every day working towards it. Just as when your dream is deferred, once you come back to it, it won’t feel like same as it did when you realized that was your dream. Hughes uses rhetorical questions to make the reader think of their dream and makes them question if letting their dream go is worth

For instance, Hughes uses the negative connotation to show that a dream dismissed could “...stink like rotten meat[.] (Hughes, 5). Once the meat is left out for too long it starts to be unappealing to us, the smell and the looks of it make us ignore it for even longer because we don’t want to deal with it. But once it gets so bad, we don’t want to be in the same area of it because it developed such a foul smell. Hughes is showing that this can happen to a dream as well. You toss it aside thinking that you will come back to it later, but once you leave it, the urge to return fades away more and more. Another example that is used by Hughes is the connotation of “crust and sugar over--” in the sixth line of his poem (Hughes, 6). Think of this; you can make a nice dessert and it’s delicious, you tell yourself that you will clean up in the morning. You wake up to your dishes having the sugar hardened onto the surface and you can’t get it off. You start scrapping off and once you're finished you see there are scratch marks all over the surface. That dish will never be the same, it will be permanently damaged. If you avoid your dream it will change forever. Hughes is using the negative connotation to get the reader to understand his tone and how it feels about a dream