Dreams Do Not Make Life Worth Living Analysis

Some people generally depend on dreams to give their life worth, value, and meaning. Dreams do not make life worth living because if dreams fail, they can cause more harm than they initially helped a person to begin with. Also, when people use dreams as a reason for living, that dream can end up backfiring and causing harm instead of helping the individual with that dream. Even though some people may use a dream as a catalyst to live and accomplish things, it 's not necessarily focusing on the present, it 's focusing on the future, which again, can be harmful if that dream is deemed unsuccessful. Two poems written by Langston Hughes called “Dreams” and “A Dream Deferred” both show that in general, dreams do not make life worth living.

Langston

By putting hope into a dream and making it the meaning of your sole existence is just setting yourself up for failure. This is shown in another one of Langston Hughes’s poems, “A Dream Deferred.” The poem says, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore / And then run?” A ‘dream deferred’ means a dream that is withheld, delayed or put to a stop. The poem implied then when a dream is stopped or withheld, that it turns into something terrible, like “rotten meat” and sticks with you through all of that. This shows that when a dream is gone, it ends up hurting a person and turning into something bad instead of giving someone the motivation to live their lives and give them hope. Another few lines state, “Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load / Or does it explode?” I think of this line as the dying dream being a weight on someone 's shoulders that 's bringing them down, considering the person is aware that the dream is falling apart yet still holds onto it while it continues to do so. By putting hope into a dream, there is always that risk of failure and disappointment that people tend to overlook because they only want to think about the positive sides of things, even if those positive things are almost improbable. When the dream finally ‘explodes’ it shows the end of the dream and the person comes to the realization that their dream has ended, which makes it somewhat tragic considering people tend to put so much hope and motivation into their dreams but they can end up failing. Therefore, Hughes’s poem, “A Dream Deferred” shows in many ways that when you put too much hope into a dream, far fetched or not, that a person can be setting themselves up for failure and the dream backfiring on