18 pages • 36 minutes read
Langston HughesDreams
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Maintaining Hope
The central theme of maintaining hope appears in the plea, “Hold fast to dreams” (Lines 1, 5). As dreams symbolize hope, people must keep them. The repeated statement is the only positive part of the poem—it involves preserving aspirations. The other six lines are negative: They detail the cruel consequences of not having aspirations—of losing dreams, thus losing hope.
The speaker highlights the urgency of maintaining hope not by showing the reader what happens when hope stays and flourishes (positive) but by illustrating what occurs when a person does not have hope in their life (negative). It’s as if the speaker wants to scare the reader into making an extra effort to save their dreams. If the reader doesn’t hang on to their dreams, their life will be despondent—it will turn into a negative, unhappy image: Either a wounded bird that can’t fly or a frozen field that can’t grow anything. A life without hope is immobile, so the poem illustrates being similarly trapped in a gloomy situation.
The repeated line that starts Stanza 1 and Stanza 2 creates a bold image. The exhortation to hold on to dreams turns dreams into a tangible item, precious and valuable. Dreams represent hope, and hope has extraordinary value—thus, a person must hold it tight and keep it close as if it were a newborn child or an irreplaceable heirloom. Hope is also vulnerable, and people must protect it and work hard to maintain connection to it. The repeated lines also turn dreams/hope into a person—a dear friend, a beloved family member, or someone they care about greatly. People must hold on to hope, similar to how they hold on to the important people in their life. If people don’t work at their relationships, they can dissipate. Likewise, if people don’t dutifully tend to their hopes, they can collapse. Hope doesn’t effortlessly stay with a person—maintaining hope requires conscious labor.
The Threat of Immobility
The poem teaches readers to hold on to their dreams by illustrating two threats. The speaker doesn’t detail the wonderful life they’ll have if they keep their dreams—instead, they illuminate the negative consequences of losing hope via two disquieting metaphors. Each metaphor centers on immobility. If a person loses hope, they don’t actively pursue gloom—instead, they’re stuck, and gloom comes to them. Unable to move, despair takes over. Life becomes a “broken-winged bird / That cannot fly” (Lines 3-4). The bird can’t go anywhere, and neither can the life of the person who loses their dream. The absence of hope arrests them and keeps them motionless. Life also turns into a “barren field / Frozen with snow” (Lines 7-8). The area can’t grow anything or welcome any new life or developments because it’s empty. No one can play on it or interact with it: The field is explicitly immobile—it’s “[f]rozen” (Line 8).
Through Hughes’s poem, the reader becomes aware that immobility is a consequence of a hopeless life, and the threat of immobility galvanizes the reader to keep their hopes. People don’t want to be like the inert bird or stagnant field: People instead want to be free to move around, and to stay active they must stick with their dreams.
Incorporating immobility is also consistent with Hughes’s role as a prominent figure during the Harlem Renaissance. As laws across the United States aimed to immobilize Black people through Jim Crow laws and segregation (See: Background), America tried to limit the movement of Black people and restrict them. The laws forced Black people to attend separate schools, restaurants, and swimming pools, and the policies forced them to use separate bathrooms and water fountains, to live in separate neighborhoods, and, in the military, to fight in different battalions. Essentially, the racist policies and laws tried to turn Black life into a wounded bird or an empty field—but the Great Migration and movements like the Harlem Renaissance combated the threat of immobility. Black people held onto their hopes and dreams: They moved, mobilized, and created spirited art. They faced brutal, lethal prejudice, but the horrifying racism didn’t trap them: Black communities remained connected to their dreams and “Dreams” is a poetic way of honoring that connection.
Determination in the Face of Adversity
The speaker calls on the reader to “[h]old fast to dreams” (Lines 1 and 5). They don’t ask the reader to hold them loosely or carelessly, but instead tightly and with determination. The directive to forcefully hold on to dreams indicates adversity—someone or something is trying to take hope away. To keep hope, people require resolve. Maintaining aspiration isn’t a peaceful endeavor: It’s a battle. The world is an adversarial place, and if people don’t firmly grasp their dreams, they’ll lose them. The determination to keep dreams parallels the lack of determination that can cause dreams to disappear. The hurt bird and the desolate field don’t possess the determination to keep moving. The implied adversity takes their hopes and chains them to a wretched predicament.
Before the United States abolished slavery in 1865, millions of Black people existed in terrifying adversarial situations when they were enslaved and treated not as humans but as tradable commodities. Enslaved Black people fought to form families and meaningful relationships, giving each other hope through songs, which laid the groundwork for blues music. They also manifested determination by secretly organizing, even with the threat of death. Enslaved Black people and white allies created the Underground Railroad—a network of places that moved enslaved Black people from slave states to free states. However, even after the United States outlawed slavery, racism didn’t disappear. Black people continued to battle life-or-death adversity (See: Background) and Hughes explores how to overcome such adversity in “Dreams.”
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