Dreams

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

Langston Hughes

Working with the text:

Try to imagine: Who could the speaker be? Who might she/he be addressing? What might the situation be in which she/he is saying this?

The two stanzas (or verses) of the poem are very similar because Langston Hughes makes use repetition. - Read the poem aloud, then talk about the effect of the repetition.

Have a close look at what is different in the two stanzas, especially at the two central images.

Looking at the complete poem, what function would you say dreams have for the speaker?

Why does/doesn't the poem appeal to you?

The speaker could be a person, who has gone through a serious disappointment or a hard stroke of fate. It however also could be somebody who wants to award courage to a different one which is in a similar situation.

The atmospheric picture of both verses is gloomy. By the reinforcements of the atmospheric picture this impression becomes the hopelessness deepened further in the second verse. The sense of the spiritual cold becomes clearly the hopelessness in a situation for a person who has no more dreams here. The poetic picture is presented as a landscape covered with snow.

The image in the first verse -a broken-winged bird- signals sadness. The speaker wants to say: "I don't fly anymore but I live because my dreams died." There is still a little hope but this tiny hope is also destroyed in the second verse. There is only another endless, white landscape, emptiness and no more live. Th dreams are gone ant hey left only frosty coolness and hopelessness back. The second image is the barren field.

The heading of the poem is "Dreams". In the poem is warned for loosing the ability to dream in hopeless situations. As long as a person has the strength for dreaming, he lives; there is a future and a morning and he believes that it is so. By the fact that Langston Hughes describes in poetic picture, he appeals to himself and every other one not loosing the ability to dream.