Dreams
Langston Hughes
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
Langston Hughes was an American poet who became famous for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. He was the first African American to support himself as a writer. In this poem, Langston Hughes shares the importance of having dreams. Without dreams, our lives do not feel complete. We do not have anything to work toward, so holding onto our dreams strengthens and empowers us. In this short poem, he pulls the reader’s attention to this theme by using the repetition of the phrase, “Hold fast to dreams.” Dreams are written in Quatrains (4 line stanzas) and follow the ABCB rhyme scheme.
“Dreams” is one of Langston Hughes’s many poems about the power and necessity of dreams for both individuals and communities. In eight short lines, the poem’s speaker warns the reader that abandoning dreams (which might mean hopes, aspirations, fantasies, imaginative visions, and/or illusions) robs life of its vitality and purpose. Through its metaphorical images of brokenness and barrenness, the poem depicts life without dreams as no longer worth living.
The speaker begins by advising the reader to hold on to dreams, illustrating the pain of a life without them by comparing it to an injured, earthbound bird.“ broken-winged bird / That cannot fly” is a suffering creature that has lost its mobility, as well as one of its defining traits (that is, the power of flight). It may also have lost its bearings, community, and means of obtaining food. The comparison thus implies that a life without dreams is painful, frustrating, deprived, and possibly unable to continue much longer. This comparison also suggests that dreams are a defining trait of humanity, something that drives and sustains people.
The speaker then repeats—in even more ominous terms—the advice to hold on to dreams, this time comparing a dreamless life to a lifeless field. Unlike an injured bird, which is alive and might recover, “a barren field / Frozen with snow” can’t sustain any life at all. This comparison indicates that giving up one’s dreams can be more than a painful crisis: it can feel like emotional or spiritual death.
The speaker never explicitly defines “dreams” in the poem, and the poem's meaning here changes slightly depending on how readers interpret the word. If readers take “dreams” to mean hopes or aspirations, then the metaphor of life as a “barren field” evokes people's inability to imagine a rewarding future (or any future, for that matter) when they lose sight of their dreams. If “dreams” means fantasies or illusions, then the metaphor suggests that life is harsh, cold, and empty when seen as it really is—that is, without the veil of “dreams” over it. By extension, the metaphor implies that the dreams people do have preserve, nourish, and enrich them, like crops from a fertile field.
” in the second indicates that nothing can keep dreams alive forever; losing them is a matter of “when,” not “if.” The poem’s abrupt Despite the speaker's call for people to cling to dreams, the shift from “if dreams die” in the first stanza to “when dreams go, sobering ending—“frozen” image, mirroring the stasis that accompanies the end of dreams and the end of life—underscores the urgency of “Hold fast to dreams” as long as possible.
Dreams are a subject that Hughes returned to over and over in his poetry. He often linked them with the experiences of Black Americans and/or the adjective “deferred” (postponed, delayed). But “Dreams” is a broad, stark statement: an unqualified warning to hold on to dreams in general, whether or not they ever come true. Their loss brings pain, incapacity, and emptiness; therefore, the poem argues, they are a vital source of pleasure, strength, and sustenance.
Dream Deferred poem
from Selected poems Book-6
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags—
like a heavy load.
Sonnet 18:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Where the Mind is Without Fear
Robindranath Tagore
Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Poet:
Robindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941) was born in Calcutta. He visited England in 1878 to study law, but returned to India, and instead became a writer, playwriter, songwriter, poet, philosopher, and educator. In 1912, he began translating his selections of poems, Gitanjali, into English. Almost all of his work prior to that time had been written in Bengali.
In 1913, Tagore received the Nobel Prize for literature. He was the first non-westerner to be so honoured. In 1915, he was knighted by the British King George V, but renounced the title in 1919, following the Amritsar massacre. He wrote over one thousand poems; eight novels; eight volumes of short stories; plays and many books and essays on philosophy, religion, education, and social topics. He composed more than two thousand songs. Two of them became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. In 1929, he began painting, too, and today his paintings hang in many museums.
Words:
domestic = relating to or used in the home or everyday life
dreary = gloomy; unexciting
fragments= pieces, usually broken off when something shatters
perfection = the quality of something that is as good or suitable as it possibly can be
striving = trying hard to achieve something
It represents Tagore's vision of a new and awakened India. It is an expression of the poet's reflective spirit and contains a simple prayer for his country, the India of pre-independence time.
Questions:
1. To whom is the poem addressed?
Ans: The poem is addressed to everyone.
2. What is the poet's request?
Ans: The poet has requested his countrymen to break free from sloth and struggle hard constantly to achieve perfection in whatever they choose to do to make their country a free nation.
According to the poet, knowledge should be free which means every person has knowledge about worldly matters. He says that if people living in the country possess knowledge then only it can develop. Knowledge keeps people united not dividing them on the basis of caste and creed.
3. What vision does the poet have of an ideal land?
Ans: The poet means India’s social, cultural, and psychological independence and unity. We should have a broad heart. And a broad mind.
They should enrich their thinking day by day. The poet has used the phrase tireless striving to urge his countrymen to break free from sloth and struggle
hard constantly to achieve perfection in whatever they choose to do to make their country a free nation.
4. Try to explain in your own words what you think the poet means by the following:
a) narrow domestic walls
Ans: The poet is talking about the barriers of class, caste, creed, colour, religion and other elements that divide people from one another.
In most cases, those are baseless superstitious beliefs and good for nothing.
b) clear stream of reason
Ans: The poet has compared reason to a clear stream and dead habit to a dry desert.
c) dreary desert sand of dead habit
Ans: According to him, dead habit means a country which has not lost the right path in the dreary desert of old traditional rituals and customs that are harmful for the country and the society.
d) ever-widening thought and action
Ans: Ever-widening thought and action means we should not be narrow or shallow in our mentality. We should have a broad heart. And a broad mind. They should enrich their thinking day by day.
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