Dreams

Summary

Dreams is an eight-line poem by Langston Hughes, first printed in May 1923 in The World Tomorrow, a Christian pacifist monthly published in New York, on a page that also carried his poem Our Land. Hughes was twenty-one. The version hosted here is that first printing, in which the speaker addresses his listener directly as my son and O boy. In the version most often reprinted today those words are gone, and the poem begins simply Hold fast to dreams. The poem has two stanzas of four lines, built on the same pattern. In the first, the speaker urges the young listener to hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. In the second he repeats the charge, for when dreams go, life is a barren field frozen with snow. Each stanza gives one command and one picture of what happens when the command is ignored. The two metaphors are carefully chosen. A bird is made to fly; a bird with a broken wing is still alive but cannot do what it was made for. A field is made to bear a harvest; a barren field frozen with snow can produce nothing. Dreams, in the poem, are the hopes and aims that let a life rise and bear fruit. To lose them is not to die but to be grounded and frozen. The direct address in the 1923 version makes the poem sound like counsel passed from an elder to a young man, close in spirit to Hughes's Mother to Son, printed the year before. The plain words, the short lines and the simple rhymes of die and fly, go and snow make it one of the easiest poems in the library to memorize. Teachers can take the poem straight. It urges perseverance and hope, and the Christian tradition agrees that hope must be held fast. Students can then ask what makes a dream worth holding and where hope that does not fail finally comes from.

Top Lessons

• Hold fast

  The poem's only command is to hold fast. Dreams do not keep themselves; they must be gripped through difficulty. Students can discuss what it means to keep a good aim steadily over years.

• Two pictures of a life without hope

  A broken-winged bird and a frozen field are both alive or real but unable to do what they were made for. Students can learn how a good metaphor explains an idea by a picture they can see.

• Advice from one generation to the next

  In the 1923 printing the speaker calls the listener my son and O boy. Like the father in Proverbs and the mother in Hughes's Mother to Son, he hands down wisdom to the young. Hughes wrote it during years when Black Americans faced segregation and many closed doors, which gives the counsel added weight.

Verified Quotes