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Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Langston Hughes
Working with the text:
1. Try to imagine: Who could the speaker be? Who might she/he be addressing? What might the situation be in which she/he is saying this?
2. The two stanzas (or verses) of the poem are very similar because Langston Hughes makes use repetition. - Read the poem aloud, then talk about the effect of the repetition.
3. Have a close look at what is different in the two stanzas, especially at the two central images.
4. Looking at the complete poem, what function would you say dreams have for the speaker?
5. Why does/doesn't the poem appeal to you?
1. The speaker could be a person, who has gone through a serious disappointment or a hard stroke of fate. It however also could be somebody who wants to award courage to a different one which is in a similar situation.
2. The atmospheric picture of both verses is gloomy. By the reinforcements of the atmospheric picture this impression becomes the hopelessness deepened further in the second verse. The sense of the spiritual cold becomes clearly the hopelessness in a situation for a person who has no more dreams here. The poetic picture is presented as a landscape covered with snow.
3. The image in the first verse -a broken-winged bird- signals sadness. The speaker wants to say: "I don't fly anymore but I live because my dreams died." There is still a little hope but this tiny hope is also destroyed in the second verse. There is only another endless, white landscape, emptiness and no more live. Th dreams are gone ant hey left only frosty coolness and hopelessness back. The second image is the barren field.
4. The heading of the poem is "Dreams". In the poem is warned for loosing the ability to dream in hopeless situations. As long as a person has the strength for dreaming, he lives; there is a future and a morning and he believes that it is so. By the fact that Langston Hughes describes in poetic picture, he appeals to himself and every other one not loosing the ability to dream.
5. Dreams accompany us, because it doesn't happen only in the reality but also in our spirit. In our dreams we paint a picture of our future or we reflect imaginatively the past. We experience the reality of the spirit in the dreams, we don't give dreams any limits, no barriers, no indissoluble problems. We fly in our dreams like a bird over the colored landscape of our fantasy. When a dream die, we were brought to the bottom of the facts - for all that broken-winged- we live. But if all dreams are gone, there is only emptiness and hopelessness. This poem means for me that I must maintain the ability for dreaming at all cost. Without dreams life is empty and much of this is missing, life makes what worth living. The poem "Dreams" by Langston Hughes showed me that in a very metaphorical way.
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