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“Harlem” Introduction
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Langston Hughes wrote “Harlem” in 1951 as part of a book-length sequence, Montage of a Dream Deferred. Inspired by blues and jazz music, Montage, which Hughes intended to be read as a single long poem, explores the lives and consciousness of the black community in Harlem, and the continuous experience of racial injustice within this community. “Harlem” considers the harm that is caused when the dream of racial equality is continuously delayed. Ultimately, the poem suggests, society will have to reckon with this dream, as the dreamers claim what is rightfully their own.
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“Harlem” Summary
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The speaker asks what happens to a vision or hope of a community, when this vision or hope is continuously put off or delayed.
The speaker asks: will that dream wither away and shrivel up like fruit left out in the sun? Or will it putrefy like a painful, infected wound and then leak out pus? Will it smell disgusting, like meat that's gone bad? Or will it become like a gooey candy that gets all crusty and crystallized?
The speaker proposes a fifth possibility: that the unfulfilled dream will simply weigh the dreamers down as they have to continue to bear it.
Finally, the speaker offers a last alternative: maybe the dream will burst outward with energy and potency, demanding to be recognized and accounted for.
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“Harlem” Themes
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The Cost of Social Injustice
Hughes wrote "Harlem" in 1951, more than a decade before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was also writing in the aftermath of the 1935 and 1943 Harlem riots, both of which were triggered by segregation, pervasive unemployment, and police brutality in the black community.
Hughes's poem responds to this context. The title, “Harlem,” places the poem in this historically black and immigrant neighborhood in New York City, while the "dream" could be any dream that those in Harlem have had: a dream for a better life, for opportunity, for equality—most broadly, for access to the American Dream itself.
But, as the poem tells readers, this dream has been continuously put off (specifically, by the policies that made black Americans second class citizens). The poem makes it clear, however, that a “dream deferred” by injustice doesn’t simply disappear. Instead, that dream must be accounted for sooner or later. Inevitably, the poem suggests, there will be a vast societal reckoning as the dreamers claim what is rightfully their own.
At first, though, the speaker addresses the idea that deferring a dream may lessen the dream itself, making it feel ever more unreachable as it fades away. The poem suggests that the deferred dream could “dry up” or “fester like a sore”; it might “stink like rotten meat … Or crust and sugar over / like a syrupy sweet." Each of these images suggests something spoiling, losing potency, or outright decaying—which is perhaps exactly the outcome a racist society, hoping to maintain the status quo, might want; such a society wants to see this dream of racial equality lose its bite and scab over.
Each comparison also makes palpable what it might feel like to have a dream that can’t be realized because of injustice. These images all imply the cost faced by black people forced to bear this injustice like a painful, infected "sore." Later, the speaker wonders if that dream "just sags / like a heavy load." In other words, maybe this dream of equality just forever weighs on communities like Harlem, dragging them down rather than lifting them up.
But then the speaker proposes an entirely different outcome for this dream, asking, “Or does it explode?” This image of explosion brings to mind the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943. It could also refer to the explosion of the dream itself, in the sense that the American Dream could be “exploded,” or shown to be hollow or false. Most importantly, the final question shifts from images of the dream withering away, festering, and sagging—all experiences that would impact those most targeted by injustice—to an image of the dream “explod[ing]” outward. All of society, this final question implies, will have to reckon with the dream, as, in its energy, vitality, and righteousness, it claims its due.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-11
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The Individual and the Community
“Harlem” can be read in two ways at once: the deferred dream in the poem can be interpreted as a collective, social dream—the dream of an entire group of people—and it may also be interpreted as an individual dream. In fact, the poem suggests that individual and collective dreams are intricately connected. Ultimately, the poem implies that individual dreams cannot be realized without the realization of the larger, collective dream of equality.
Perhaps most obviously, the poem can be read as being about the deferral of a collective dream. The title, “Harlem,” frames the poem as being about the experience of an entire community—that of Harlem. The dream, then, implicitly, is the dream of this neighborhood and group of people. In the poem, the dream is also described with the singular “it,” suggesting that the dream is the same throughout the poem and that there is one, primary dream continuously at stake. Given the title, this suggests that throughout the poem, the dream described is the dream of Harlem as a whole.
At the same time, however, the poem can be read as about the deferral of individual dreams—that is, the hopes and desires of single people within this community. The poem compares the deferred dream to things that an individual would experience. A “raisin in the sun” is a tiny thing that a single person might observe; similarly, “a sore” is something an individual would endure. An individual might encounter the “stink of rotten meat” or have to bear “a heavy load.” These comparisons suggest that the dream in the poem could be an individual dream, or many individual dreams, and the deferral of these dreams is experienced on a personal, immediate scale.
The use of “a dream” instead of “the dream” further suggests that the dream could be interpreted in different ways, including on the individual level. The word “the” is often used with proper nouns, or to convey something that is singular, public, or widely known. Conversely, “a” suggests that the dream is one of many dreams, not the only one. This supports the idea that the dream could be an individual dream, or one of many individual dreams.
The historical context of the poem also supports these two readings. “Harlem” was written in 1951, during the era of Jim Crow segregation and the early period of the Civil Rights Movement. It was also written in the aftermath of World War II, when black Americans fought in the United States military—to defeat Nazism and to defend American visions of equality and liberty— but were forced to do so within segregated ranks. The sense of a collective dream of equality, and the deferral of this dream, was intensely present.
The persistence of systemic racism also meant that many individual dreams of black Americans could not be realized. For example, a black family might dream of buying a home, but racist policies like discriminatory lending practices and redlining made this virtually impossible.
Within this context, many individual dreams could literally not be realized without the realization of a larger, collective dream of equality and Civil Rights. By making both individual and collective experience present within in the poem, “Harlem” reflects and comments on this reality, suggesting that the deferral of the collective dream of equality is felt and carried on a palpable, human scale.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-11
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Harlem”
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Line 1
What happens to a dream deferred?
The title and first line of “Harlem” establish the poem’s context and its central question. The title places the poem in a particular location, a historically black American neighborhood in New York City. In the early 20th century, millions of black Americans migrated from the rural south to urban areas in the midwest, west and north of the country, including Harlem. In the 1910s and 1920s, during and immediately after the Great Migration, the neighborhood became the seat of the Harlem Renaissance, an outpouring of black literature, art, and music that sought to explore and express the experiences of black people in America.
The poem’s title also evokes the racial injustice that inhabitants of Harlem have endured. At the time the poem was written, in 1951, black people had fought for the U.S. military in World War II, yet still faced state-sanctioned racism, segregation, police brutality, pervasive unemployment, and white supremacist violence at home. These conditions led to the Harlem Riots of 1935 and 1943, as well as to the Civil Rights Movement, which was, in the early 1950s, beginning to take stronger shape.
The title works, then, to establish the geographical, political, and cultural context within which the poem’s questions are explored, and its first line understood. This opening line, “What happens to a dream deferred?” is the only line that is completely left-aligned; the rest of the poem is indented. In this way, the formatting connects the poem’s first question to the title, almost as though it is an extension of the title.
The “dream” of the poem’s first question, read within this context, acquires inevitable connotations; from the outset, it is clear that the poem is not just about a personal, individual dream, but about a larger dream of social justice held by those in Harlem who have, for so long, endured inequality.
At the level of language, the opening question is concise and direct, inviting the reader to immediately engage with and try to answer it. In a sense, the question involves and implicates the reader in the problem of what will happen to the dream. This sense of involvement, which is sustained by the questions throughout the poem, connects readers to the dream and to what is at stake, suggesting that the dream is important, not just for the people of Harlem, but for everyone.
The opening line also juxtaposes the conversational quality of “What happens” with the compression and musical qualities of the phrase “dream deferred.” In this second phrase, the alliteration of the /d/ sounds and the consonance of the long /e/ sounds (in “dream” and the first syllable of “deferred”) tie the words together, suggesting that the dream is, by default, “deferred” or continuously put off.
Yet this phrase is also, in certain ways, disjunctive. Readers might expect the phrase to read “a dream that is deferred,” but in the poem the connecting words (“that” and “is”) are omitted. The shorter /e/ sound in the second syllable of “deferred,” meanwhile, shifts the phrase out of its apparent musical unity.
Finally, “deferred” is not a word usually associated with dreams. “To defer” literally means “to postpone” or “to put off.” “Deferment” is a word that has been connected with the military draft, including during World War II: someone eligible for a draft deferment would not be drafted or deployed right away.
The word, as it appears here, sounds strangely technical and bureaucratic, contrasting sharply with the visionary, humane idea of a “dream.” This disjunction at the level of sound and meaning introduces tension and irresolution at the poem’s outset.
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Lines 2-5
Does it dry ...
... And then run?
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Lines 6-8
Does it stink ...
... a syrupy sweet? -
Lines 9-11
Maybe it just ...
... does it explode?
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“Harlem” Symbols
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The Dream
While “Harlem” uses a series of similes to describe what might happen to a dream that is continuously put off, the poem’s primary symbol is the dream itself.
“What happens to a dream deferred?” the speaker asks. The speaker doesn’t go on to define what the dream is or whose dream it is; instead, the poem leaves this implicit and, in some ways, open-ended. The title suggests that the dream is one held by those who live in Harlem, and also perhaps those who live in communities similar to Harlem. Given the historical circumstances of the poem, this means that the dream could be one held by black people and other people of color who have been continuously held down and back by a racist society.
Still, even with this degree of specific interpretation, the dream remains symbolic. It stands, in the poem, for one dream of equality, but also for the many individual dreams held by people who are oppressed. As a symbol, it embodies all of these people’s hopes and expectations and sense of possibility. In a way, then, the symbol allows many different readers to “read themselves” into the poem, as readers identify with the dream and with the frustration of its deferral.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 1: “dream”
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“Harlem” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Anaphora
Anaphora works in several ways “Harlem.” First, it provides a recognizable pattern and structure to the speaker’s questions, beginning in stanza 2. “Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” the speaker asks. “Or fester like a sore—And then run?” These opening lines of the stanza establish a pattern that will repeat, with some variation: “Does it stink like rotten meat?” the speaker asks next. “Or crust and sugar over— / like a syrupy sweet?”
Note the words and phrases that repeat anaphorically:
Does it …
like …
Or …
Does it …
Or …
like …
The only line in this stanza that does not begin anaphorically is the one exactly at its center, line 5: “And then run?” The stanza, then, creates a highly patterned form for itself. The repeating beginnings of the questions and lines give them energy and momentum, and also make them, in a sense, predictable, creating a kind of deceptive calm.
Importantly, then, “Harlem” also disrupts this predictability by how it changes its own anaphora. Note, for example, how in the second half of the stanza, the order of anaphoric phrases changes, from “like… Or… ” to “Or… like.” Stanza three also shifts away from this pattern, though echoes it with the “like” in line 10 (“like a heavy load”). These subtle changes introduce an increasing sense of instability in the poem.
The last line both changes and combines the anaphora that has been introduced up to this point. “Or does it explode?” the speaker asks, bringing together the “or” and the “does it” in the second stanza into a single line and a single anaphoric phrase. Here, the tension that has built in the poem up to this point between pattern and variation comes into full awareness, as the poem transforms its own pattern. Like the explosion the poem describes, this transformation may seem sudden or startling, yet the poem has actually been building toward this point all along.
Where anaphora appears in the poem:- Line 2: “Does it”
- Line 3: “like”
- Line 4: “Or”
- Line 6: “Does it”
- Line 7: “Or”
- Line 8: “ like”
- Line 10: “like”
- Line 11: “Or does it”
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Allusion
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Consonance
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Assonance
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End-Stopped Line
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Parallelism
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Rhetorical Question
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Simile
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Imagery
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Enjambment
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“Harlem” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Harlem
- Deferred
- Fester
- Run
- Load
- Explode
Harlem-
(Location in poem: )
Harlem is a neighborhood in New York City, in the northern area of Manhattan, that became known as a predominantly African American community following the Great Migration of the early 20th century. Harlem was the seat of the Harlem Renaissance, a major movement of black art, literature, and culture in the 1910s and 1920s, and has been home to such African American artists, writers, and musicians as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Harlem”
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Form
As a free verse poem, “Harlem” has no set form. Its 11 lines unfold over four stanzas of very different lengths, adding a sense of unpredictability to the poem. Ultimately, the poem creates its own form, suggesting that those whose dream has been deferred must find their own answer to what will happen to the dream, even if this answer explodes the rules of dominant white society.
The poem uses four stanzas of varying lengths that create a subtle form building towards the poem’s ending. The opening line (“What … deferred?”) and the last line (“Or … explode?”) are the only single-line stanzas in the poem, mirroring each other.
A close look at the structure of the whole indented part of the poem (from line 2 to the ending) also reveals a kind of form at work. The first four lines of the second stanza (“Does it dry … And then run?”) create, through their rhyming pattern, a kind of quatrain.
The last three lines of this stanza (“Does it stink … syrupy sweet?”) are similarly clustered through rhyme. Lines 9 to 10 (“Maybe … load”) are visually held together by the couplet they inhabit. Line 11 (“Or does it explode?”) is then set apart as singular and distinct.
The poem, then, sets up a kind of count-down structure: 4-3-2-1, creating a form that enacts what it describes, as though the speaker is counting down to the explosion.
Finally, the formal elements of “Harlem”—both those that are traditional and those the poem creates—allude to the blues and jazz. These musical forms, which emerged from the black community, use recurring motifs and patterns, but also disrupt these patterns at crucial points to express complex feeling, juxtaposition, and dissonance. "Harlem" creates a similar form, as it explores the dissonant experience of having a dream that is continually oppressed and unfulfilled.
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Meter
“Harlem” is a free verse poem and has no set meter. However, it does use some metrical elements, and it uses elements of rhythm throughout.
Notably, the opening line of the poem is written in iambs, poetic feet in which the first syllable is unstressed and the second stressed:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Iambs are most famously known as part of iambic pentameter, the metrical form associated with Shakespeare and classical poetry. Here, the speaker asks the poem’s primary, opening question in iambic meter, aligning that question, and the poem, with some of the timeless questions of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
After this moment, the poem shifts into its own rhythms, which enact the rhythms and cadences of jazz music. Jazz, as a form, often takes simple rhythms and interweaves them with complex ones, in which unexpected beats are accented and emphasized. The section of “Harlem” that replies to the opening question—in other words, the whole rest of the poem—does so with jazz rhythm, taking up, and then transforming, the iambs of its opening.
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Rhyme Scheme
“Harlem” has no set, consistent rhyme scheme. Rather, it uses assonance and rhyming elements throughout to create patterns and then change these patterns, conveying the feeling and meaning of the poem at the level of its music.
After the first, unrhymed line, which poses the primary question of the poem, the second stanza creates a rhyme scheme as it offers a series of possible answers. The ending of line 3 (“sun”) rhymes with the ending of line 5 (“run”). This sets up an ABCB rhyme scheme that might appear in a traditional poem, creating a sense of formal control and resolution.
Importantly, this rhyme scheme appears where the dream is depicted as withering away (“a raisin in the sun”) and growing painful and aggravated (“like a sore”) for the dreamer, but not impacting anyone in the broader society. In a sense, here, the rhyme scheme suggests that the dreamers are simply enduring the deferral of the dream, and “following the rules,” just as the poem “follows the rules” of a conventional rhyme scheme.
Yet the poem goes on to change these rules. After the ABCB pattern opening this second stanza, the poem introduces a group of three lines (“Does it stink … like a syrupy sweet?”) in which only two lines out of the three rhyme: “meat” rhymes with “sweet,” while “over” is left unrhymed. The images continue, here, to convey a deferred dream that is losing its true power and potency (it is going bad “like rotten meat” and becoming sentimental “like a syrupy sweet”) but the shift in the rhyme scheme introduces a sense of instability, of something left unresolved.
Similarly, but differently, “sags” in line 9 is left unrhymed. The end of line 10, "load," also appears at first to be unrhymed, since it doesn’t rhyme with the first line of its couplet. The rhyme comes unexpectedly in the poem’s closing question, after the space of a stanza break: “Or does it explode?” the speaker asks.
Here, for the first time, two rhyming lines appear consecutively, and the way the poem arrives at this rhyme is radically different from those that came before. The rhyme bridges two stanzas.
And the last line arrives at a completely different possibility for the dream than those proposed up to this point. Here the deferred dream is not imagined as withering away, rotting, or sagging. Instead it is envisioned as bursting outward in its true vitality and power. The final question and rhyme, then, creates an unexpected musical resolution, as the poem suggests that the dream, rather than withering away, will explode outward, demanding to be reckoned with.
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“Harlem” Speaker
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The speaker of “Harlem” is anonymous and genderless. There is no “I” in the poem, so the reader’s awareness of the speaker comes through the title and the ways the questions in the poem are posed.
The title, “Harlem,” suggests that the speaker might be someone who lives in Harlem, within this neighborhood and community. At the same time, the questions in the poem are posed with a certain amount of distance. For example, the speaker asks, “What happens to a dream deferred?” This question would resonate differently if the speaker asked, “What happens to our dream” or “my dream.” The speaker seems to be within Harlem, and, at the same time, outside of it or observing it.
Meanwhile, the tone of the questions for much of the poem is musing, almost detached. The speaker makes a series of comparisons in the second stanza but doesn’t explicitly comment on the feeling or meaning of these comparisons. Instead, the speaker’s thinking and feeling comes through in the building momentum of the questions, the troubling, vivid images, and the shift at the poem’s ending. “Or does it explode?” the speaker asks, finally, and the italics give this question a voiced quality, as though it is possible to hear the speaker asking this, with a restrained and precise intensity.
It is clear, through how the poem builds, and through the way this question musically resolves the poem, that this is the true answer to the opening question of what will happen to the dream. The speaker, then, is implicitly one who witnesses the deferral of the dream and all its costs, and who senses the coming explosion.
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“Harlem” Setting
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The setting of “Harlem” is at once highly specific and open-ended. The title locates the poem in a particular place—Harlem, a historically black neighborhood in New York City. The time of the poem’s composition, 1951, lets the reader know the poem’s social and political setting: during segregation, and before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. This context charges the poem’s setting with specific meaning.
At the same time, much of the poem can be read in a more open-ended way. Harlem as a neighborhood is not mentioned within the poem’s lines. Rather, the images in the poem establish an emotional, implicit setting. The image of a raisin that has dried up conveys a sense of abandonment. The sore, too, suggests abandonment and decay, a lack of care. The rotten meat and syrupy sweet also convey neglect.
Many of the images also subtly convey almost intolerable heat: the sun which dries the raisin up; the “stink” of rotting meat; the sweet that “crust[s] and sugar[s] over” as though it has melted and then crystallized. Within this imagery, the poem also envisions “a heavy load,” which feels even heavier, harder to bear, in such an environment.
These images can be read as conveying the intolerable feeling of living in ongoing conditions of injustice, and ongoing conditions of poverty, where one’s neighborhood is left neglected and uncared for, and where the heat of disappointment, frustration, and anger continues to build. These experiences could be shared by many people in neighborhoods similar to Harlem. The setting of the poem, then, is specific, but also suggests that Harlem is not merely a single place, but also a set of shared experiences.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Harlem”
Literary Context
“Harlem” was written during the time period following the Harlem Renaissance of the 1910s and 1920s, an outpouring of literature, art, and music from the black community in Harlem. Langston Hughes was a leader in this movement, which sought to explore and center black experiences and formulate a distinctly black aesthetic, rather than following white models and norms.
In his seminal 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes described the challenges facing black artists, who were fetishized and exoticized by white society on the one hand and dismissed and silenced on the other. Hughes argued that black artists must embrace their culture as a source of true creativity and beauty.
“If white people are pleased, we are glad,” Hughes wrote. “If they are not, it doesn’t matter … If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
While the Harlem Renaissance is considered to have ended with the onset of the Great Depression in the late 1920s, it lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement, and later for the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. When Hughes wrote “Harlem” in 1951, he did so consistently with the values he had laid out in his essay nearly 30 years before.
He wrote the poem as part of a longer work, Montage of a Dream Deferred, a book length sequence that Hughes also envisioned being read as a single long poem. The poems in the book are inspired by the black musical forms of jazz and the blues, and the book as a whole explores the experiences, culture, and racial consciousness of the community of Harlem. The “dream deferred” is a recurrent motif in the book, as the poems consider the human cost of ongoing injustice.
As an individual poem, “Harlem” inspired numerous well-known works that came later. Notably, the poem gave the title to the 1959 play by Lorraine Hansberry, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which tells the story of a black family’s experiences in the South Side of Chicago as they attempt to overcome poverty and segregation. The opening line of “Harlem” also inspired the famous refrain of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech.
Today, “Harlem” continues to exert its relevance, as the issues the poem speaks to—including ongoing racism and police brutality—remain acutely present in many communities and throughout the United States.
Historical Context
The historical context of “Harlem” is interwoven with its literary context and is deeply important to understanding the poem. This historical context involves the history of Harlem itself.
During the Great Migration in the early twentieth century, more than six million African Americans moved from the rural South to cities in the midwestern, western, and northern United States. There, a combination of state-sanctioned racism—including redlining and segregation—and white supremacist violence forced black people into poor sections of cities where they faced rampant unemployment and unfair rents.
Harlem was one such neighborhood that came to be known as a ghetto, entrapping the people who lived there within cycles of poverty. These conditions led to the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943, both of which were also triggered by instances of violence against African Americans; the 1943 riot began after a white police officer shot and wounded a black soldier.
By the time the poem was written, in 1951, black people had fought for the U.S. military in World War II to defeat fascism and defend American visions of freedom and equality. Yet these soldiers were forced to fight within segregated ranks, and at home all black Americans continued to endure legal and extralegal racism and violence.
The dream of racial equality and equal opportunity, briefly glimpsed during the period following the U.S. Civil War, had been continuously put off and delayed. This sense of deferral, and the need to demand justice and equality, led to the Civil Rights Movement. In a sense, Hughes’s poem envisions and predicts the energy and power of this movement, as it envisions the dream “explod[ing]” and demanding to be accounted for.
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More “Harlem” Resources
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External Resources
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An Essay From the Poetry Foundation — Read more about "Harlem" in this essay by Scott Challener at the Poetry Foundation.
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Letter from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Hughes — Read a letter from Martin Luther King, Kr. to Langston Hughes, which includes a reference to a performance of Lorraine Hansberry's play “A Raisin in the Sun."
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"Harlem" Read Aloud by Langston Hughes — Listen to Langston Hughes read "Harlem."
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Full Text of "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" — Read Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."
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The Harlem Renaissance — Learn more about the Harlem Renaissance from the History Channel.
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Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr. — Read about how Langston Hughes influenced Martin Luther King, Jr., including the influence of "Harlem."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Langston Hughes
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