Dream Deferred by: Langston Hughes

This poem can be applied to any person's life. Everyone has dreams and hopes for the future that do not actually happen. The author uses descriptive imagery to compare these deferred dreams to unpleasant things. He compares the dream first to a dried up raison, meaning it has lost its appeal and is worthless. Then he says it could fester like a sore, meaning it will always bother the dreamer that they never completed this dream/goal. Finally he compares the dream to something that is crusted over with sugar as in it has been sugar coated so much that it now sounds better than it actually is. He makes these comparisons with similies yet his last line; "Or does it explode?" is a metaphor as well as a retorical question. Making this line a metaphor seemed to poss the other comparisions as possibilites but this last one as the one the author thinks is most likely to happen. The retorical question allows the reader to ponder what the author could mean by this and formulate their own opinion.