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Close study of Hughes’s poem reveals that it has a complex tone which exhibits an ongoing tension between earnest hope in the dream of America and ironic critique of that same dream. Perhaps the clearest expression of this twofold tone appears in the poem’s opening sixteen lines. This section approximates the form of an English sonnet, structured as three quatrains followed by a couplet—all rhyming and written in loose iambic pentameter. Hughes matches the technical formality of these lines with a linguistic formality that expresses the lofty ideal of America as a land of freedom and equality. As an example, consider the second full quatrain (lines 6–9):

     Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
     Let it be that great strong land of love
     Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
     That any man be crushed by one above.

These lines conjure an idealistic vision that opposes American democratic freedom to the supposed bondage of European monarchies. But the speaker also introduces a counterpoint of critique, which appears in the form of single-line parenthetical statements that appear between the opening quatrains (lines 5 and 10, respectively):

     (America never was America to me.)

     (It never was America to me.)

The couplet that concludes the implied sonnet is also critical and contained within parentheses (lines 15–16):

     (There’s never been equality for me,
     Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

These counterpoints introduce a thread of criticism that complicates the lofty ideals expressed in the quatrains, thereby creating a tension between earnestness and irony, hope and skepticism.

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