Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, February 26, 2025.

Today's poem is by Langston Hughes, and it's called Dreams.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time. Dreams.

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.

This compact little poem is playing on the same theme,

or nearly the same theme, as Hughes' more well-known poem,

Harlem, which opens with the question,

what happens to a dream deferred? And in that poem, Hughes

presents the kind of danger or threat of a dream that is bottled up, waiting inevitably for

its time to come. Here, dreams are, we get the other side of dreams, maybe. Dreams are this

sustaining force here in this poem. And there's some ambiguity about how we're meant to think of

them. Hold fast to dreams is this refrain in the first and in the fifth line.

And other than that, there's not a lot of regularity in the poem.

The lines metrically are pretty similar, but the rhyme scheme is fairly broken.

We have this A, B, C, B, rhyme, which really results in not being able to easily hear and pick out the rhyming sounds.

And so there's this sense in which also the only negative or the only rhyming sounds are on

negative words, if dreams die cannot fly. The idea of dreams dying and flying away dreams go

frozen with snow the rhymes come on these very negative points and so there maybe there's this

kind of text painting this idea that the only thing that sustains a note of hope in the face of overwhelming anxiety or perhaps

even evidence that our hopes are in vain is this thin line, this constant or consistent thread

...