Hughes and Holiday: "Harlem" and

Hughes and Holiday: "Harlem" and "Strange Fruit." Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem" begins with the famous opening question: "What happens to a dream deferred?" "Harlem" has a song-like quality because of its simplicity of language and its brevity. Like a song, the poem seems to arise in the moment of feeling, in the lyrical and spontaneous voice of a poetic speaker.

The poem, despite the fact that it is not about a specific incident and is thus quite abstract, also feels guttural, as if it the result of tensions that have long been brewing within the heart of the speaker. The poem does make use of simile, but not in an elaborate or ironic fashion, which intensifies its visceral nature.

In fact, the extended metaphor "Strange Fruit," the song about a lynched man hanging on a popular tree on a summer day in the South, is in many ways more subtle in nature as its central metaphor is more extended and elaborate in its construction. Hughes' poem would not seem to be explicitly about the plight of African-Americans in America were it not for its title "Harlem," a place where so many African-Americans are known to reside.

The poem unfolds as a cry from the heart and evolves in a series of seemingly unlinked similes. The similes are interrogatory in nature, as if the speaker is asking why, why, why must my dreams be deferred, as well as "what happens?" The Lewis Allen lyrics to "Strange Fruit," which were famously sung by Billie Holiday, are also about the status of African-Americans in society during the period of the song's construction. In its case, the Allen song chronicles the aftermath of a lynching.

The image is not metaphorical or abstract, but designed to shock the listener with images of blood and death. Like the "dream deferred" that dries up like a raisin in the sun, the subject at the center of the song is analogized to a kind of fruit. But in the Holiday song, the dream is not merely deferred, the dreamer is dead, hanging on a tree, the victim of injustice.

Unlike the song, Hughes' poem is tingled with melancholy sadness until the implied threat of violence in the passionate, ending question: "does it explode." The drying up of the dream like a raisin suggests that the spirit of someone who is the victim of prejudice experiences a kind of living death, with all vital forces sucked away from his or her sprit like dried fruit. The dream can also "crust over" like something sweet, implying the false face that African-Americans must put on to live in America.

(a Raisin in the Sun, the Lorraine Hansberry play that uses a line from the poem as its title, portrays one of the central characters, a chauffer named Walter Lee, as a man filled with rage who must smile and cater to whites in his job).

This contrast between sweetness and reality is even more dramatically depicted in "Strange Fruit," where images of the old, genteel South of Magnolia trees are starkly juxtaposed against the image of a dead, African-American male: "Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, / Then the sudden smell of burning flesh." The dream that sags like a heavy load in "Harlem" is a living man in "Strange Fruit." "Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze," sings Holiday. Hughes' poem demands a more intellectual appreciation of the use of figurative language than the song.

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