Previous Next

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Erosion of Morale

Although they speak in a somewhat detached tone, the speaker is evidently concerned about the erosion of morale in the Harlem community. This concern about erosion arises most clearly in the second stanza, where the speaker explicitly compares the deferral of a dream to a series of degenerative processes. The first degenerative process the speaker mentions is that of a grape drying in the sun and shriveling into a raisin. Next, the speaker compares the deferral of a dream to a festering wound that oozes with pus. Immediately thereafter they liken it to rotting meat. Finally, the speaker imagines the dream crusting over like crystallized sugar. The speaker refers to these degenerative processes as a way of reflecting on the different ways the Harlem community has lost its former sense of strength and cohesion. Desiccated, festering, rotten, and crusted over: these terms relate symbolically to the social, political, and economic disintegration of Harlem in the decades that have passed since the Harlem Renaissance. Stuck in this downward trajectory, the speaker worries about the future of their community.

The Danger of Stagnation

The speaker shows great concern about the future of the Black community in Harlem. Given the predominant images of desiccation, rot, and lifelessness, the speaker’s outlook is clearly quite grim. The reason things look bad from their point of view is that the Harlem community’s long-held dream of socioeconomic advancement has failed to materialize. Although not explicitly discussed in the poem itself, the speaker’s notion of a “dream” harkens back to a period in the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance. This period witnessed the flourishing of Black artistic and intellectual life, and it sparked hope for the socioeconomic advancement of Black life in Harlem and elsewhere in the United States. With this background in mind, we can understand that the speaker’s “dream deferred” (line 1) symbolizes socioeconomic stagnation. This kind of stagnation is dangerous. When people feel trapped and unable to progress in their lives and communities, it can cause them to act out of desperation. Hence, when the speaker concludes the poem by suggesting that the dream might end up exploding, they’re indicating that Harlem could potentially erupt into chaos and self-destructive violence.

The Energizing Potential of Revolution

Although the poem’s conclusion suggests that Harlem might erupt into self-destructive violence, it is also possible to interpret the poem’s ending in a more positive light. In this alternative reading, the explosion referenced in the final line refers not to the unleashing of destructive behavior but to the release of revolutionary energy. The key to this interpretation resides in how the speaker’s final line reverses two patterns that develop in the poem’s middle stanzas. The first pattern relates to the speaker’s images of degeneration—that is, of desiccation, rot, and weariness. Whereas these images imply that Harlem’s vitality is fading, the image of an explosion introduces a burst of revitalizing energy. The second pattern relates to a syntactic structure that repeats in the second stanza. There, the speaker asks a series of four rhetorical questions, which are broken into pairs. Each pair opens with a question that starts, “Does it . . . ?,” and the second question extends the first by adding, “Or . . . ?” The final line breaks this pattern by integrating both phrases and reversing their order: “Or does it explode?” (line 11). This reversal could be interpreted as predicting a reversal of Harlem’s disintegration in the form of a long-awaited social revolution.

Previous section Setting Next section Motifs

Take a Study Break