Dream Variations by Langston Hughes

First published: 1924, as “Dream Variation”; collected in The Weary Blues, 1926

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Dream Variations” (originally “Dream Variation”) consists of two stanzas, the first of nine lines, the second of eight. Its title connects it with one of Langston Hughes’s major themes: dreams, especially the dreams of African Americans.

The variations referred to in the title are those that the second stanza introduces: The first eight lines of stanza 1 correspond closely, line by line, with the eight lines of stanza 2. The first lines of the two stanzas are in fact identical, but thereafter stanza 2 varies from stanza 1, sometimes by the change of but a word, sometimes by more pronounced changes. The most dramatic variation is in line 3: “To whirl and to dance” becomes “Dance! Whirl! Whirl!”

The poem is written in the first person, so it is tempting to associate the speaker with the poet himself. Yet the speaker could be either male or female (nothing in the poem is gender-specific), and Hughes’s biographer, Arnold Rampersad, refers to the speaker’s “childlike, perhaps androgynous persona.” There is certainly a quality of innocence in the speaker’s tone and therefore in the poem as a whole.

Although there is a period after the first four lines of each stanza, those lines do not constitute a complete sentence. Apparently, the period is there to make the reader pause and reflect on the opening lines before going on to complete each stanza’s thought. Thematically, what divides each stanza is that the first four lines allude to daylight hours, the fifth and sixth lines to the transitional phase of evening, and the seventh and eighth lines to the coming of night. The contrast between light and dark is central to the poem.

There is a strong suggestion that the light and dark hours of the day correlate with white and black cultures and people. Thus “the white day” not only refers to the time when the sun is out but also hints at the whole workaday world in which white people (in the young Langston Hughes’s experience) were mostly in charge. The poem’s black speaker explicitly associates night with himself or herself: It is “Dark like me” and “Black like me.”

Forms and Devices

The central contrast between light and dark, day and night, white and black, extends to the activities and the images associated with each. Daylight hours are the time of energetic exertion: Flinging arms, whirling, dancing; these exertions may be taken as representative in some degree of all daytime (and public) activities. Evening is associated with rest, night with gentleness, tenderness (and privacy). In the daytime, the self may assert itself, express itself, and expend its force; at night, there is recovery and, by implication, love.

If the most striking action of the poem is the daylight’s dancing, whirling, the most striking image of the poem is the “tall tree” beneath which one may rest at evening. In the second stanza, the speaker becomes “A tall, slim tree”; the night, a personified presence, envelops and is unified with that phallic tree. That this union is implicitly sexual is reinforced by the language describing the way in which night approaches: “comes on gently,” “coming tenderly.”

The poem’s sexual overtones are subtle; the speaker in the poem seems not to be fully conscious of them. This is part of the childlike, innocent aspect of the poem, and it is underscored by the poem’s purposefully simple vocabulary. All seventy-seven words in the poem are readily accessible; none is obscure. Moreover, seventy-one of them are words of one syllable (five have two syllables, only one has three).

Each stanza begins with a succession of one-syllable words: In each case, “evening,” at the end of line 5, breaks the string. All words of more than one syllable appear in lines 5 through 7. They are words that caress the ear with soft n and ing sounds (evening, Beneath, gently, evening, coming, tenderly). This reinforces the experience that these lines describe, the sense of which is conveyed overtly by words such as “gently” and “tenderly.” The trisyllabic “tenderly” is climactically positioned, for effect. Then each stanza ends, as it began, with monosyllables, their clipped, staccato effect intensified by the clicking k sounds: “Dark like me,” then “Black like me.”

Evening is “cool” and “pale”: The tactile and visual senses alike are muted. Rest replaces motion; the stationary tree replaces the whirling figure. Night is static, centripetal, rooted, but it is also more complex, more humane. There is something uncomfortably confrontational about flinging one’s “arms wide/ In the face of the sun”—but night’s confrontation is gentle, tender. At the end, the poem resolves with the blackness, not of oblivion, but a kind of fulfillment.

Bibliography

Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. New York: Wings Books, 1995.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Langston Hughes. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.

Chinitz, David. “Rejuvenation Through Joy: Langston Hughes, Primitivism, and Jazz.” American Literary History 9 (Spring, 1997): 60-78.

Cooper, Floyd. Coming Home: From the Life of Langston Hughes. New York: Philomel Books, 1994.

Harper, Donna Sullivan. Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories by Langston Hughes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995.

Haskins, James. Always Movin’ On: The Life of Langston Hughes. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1993.

Hokanson, Robert O’Brien. “Jazzing It Up: The Be-bop Modernism of Langston Hughes.” Mosaic 31 (December, 1998): 61-82.

Leach, Laurie F. Langston Hughes: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004.

Mullen, Edward J., ed. Critical Essays on Langston Hughes. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.

Ostrum, Hans A. A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Tracy, Steven C., ed. A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.