langston huges - dream deferredAfter the Civil War won black freedom, it seemed that their dreams of great opportunity would finally come true. However, they encountered even more obstacles, which left blacks wondering whether their dreams had any chance of coming true, or whether they should simply give up. In his poem “Harlem,” Langston Hughes used increasingly destructive imagery to present his warning of what will happen if you delay in achieving your goal. Hughes's first two images depict wilting and withering, a sense of death. His first example, “a dried raisin,” conveys that the deferred dream has dwindled to nothing and has no hope of ever being realized. The dried raisins, being old, wrinkled and lifeless, suggest that the deferred dream is forgotten, lost and nothing more than a memory. The second example, the caked syrup, being hard and dry, once again suggests that the dream deferred has no life. Furthermore, being bittersweet, using the example of syrup implies that the dream deferred is hard and sour (undesirable) on the outside, but sweet on the inside. The next two images that Hughes uses continue to suggest a sense of death and decay. The first, the "rotten flesh", which smells and stinks of death, strongly suggests that the deferred dream has lost its beauty. This image also implies that the dream is a thing of the past that now has no value. The second image, a "flowing sore", suggests that the ...