5, 4, 3, 2...Understanding

In Langston Hughes' poem, Dream Deferred, the topic of the poem is in the title, so that is no great mystery. The real window into the mind of the writer comes with the revelation that he was a black man in a time of racial strife in America. The poem begins to not necessarily take on a new meaning, but become more specific in its motive. African Americans at the time likely saw many dreams deferred. When one considers the hard times they went through with slavery, segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and other related subjects, it is difficult to imagine a dream becoming recognized by someone of a different skin color at the time. To me, this poem seems to be a sort of letter to himself. He is essentially asking himself what he will do with all the dreams that could not be fulfilled because the color of his skin. One might say that this is reading too much into the poem, but it really makes perfect sense. Hughes, at the end of the poem, asks if the dreams will explode. This is symbolic because that is exactly what was happening to the Civil Rights Movement. It was exploding to a scale no one thought it could reach and people of every color were becoming concerned and involved.