Harlem by Langston Hughes

This poem is short consisting of only 7 stanzas. Most of the stanzas are questions. The rhymes are sun, run ..sore, over..meat, sweet. Langston Hughes starts this poem off with a intense question; "What happens to a dream deffered?" (what happens to a dream postponed, or delayed). He then choses to answer that question with more questions throught the poem; "Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?". While we are trying to figure out what happens to a dream deffered, he keeps giving us more things to think about. From running, to sores, to sugar, to sags in heavy loads and the final question: "Or does it explode?". We don't know what happens to dreams when they are interrupted. They could go on in other places of the mind or wait for us to fall back asleep and continue. Maybe Langston is talking about dreams as in goals or things we look forward to. Do our goals in life dry up, fester, rot, crust over, sag or explode? We can't figure out what he is trying to mean because he answers each question with another question. I believe he wants us to believe that things we think too hard about explode. He gives us all those questions to contemplate and then he drops us off a cliff with the explode question. I think he doesn't want us to get a brain haemorrhage, but he does want to confuse us with what meaning it could be. I like how simple the poem looks, but it spans out into a million possibilities.