Part 1 of Essay
After the Civil War won the black people their freedom, it seemed as though their dreams of great opportunities were finally going to come true. However, they were met by even more obstacles, which left the blacks to wonder if their dreams had any chance of occurring, or if they should just give up. In his poem, “Harlem, ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... hard and sour (undesirable) on the outside, yet sweet on the inside. The next two images Hughes uses continue to suggest a sense of death and decay. The first, “rotten meat,” which is odorous and reeks of death, very strongly suggests that the dream deferred has lost its beauty. This image also implies that the dream is a thing of past that’s now worthless. The second image, a “running sore,” hints that the dream is synonymous to a diseased, infected wound. The dream has now become grotesque, ugly, and painfu ....