Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes

While reading these poems, I tried to treat them as a sort of running narrative. It's interesting to read poetry collections in this way because it allows you to look for connections and possibly unveil something striking that otherwise would not emerge from reading the poems separately (although that can have its benefits as well). Three poems that I found interesting when strung together were "Movies", "Tell Me", and "Not a Movie" (230-231).

In the first poem, "Movies", the lines that strike me most are "(Hollywood / laughs at me, / black-- / so I laugh / back.)" This poem is I think identifying the fact that Hollywood alienates colored people and, initially, these people don't know how to react to their very specific roles in films and television. In the next poem ("Tell Me") it seems as if the speaker has a more developed idea of their role and their opinion about it.

"Why should it be my loneliness, / Why should it be my song, / Why should it be my dream" (231). It does seem as if colored people are pinpointed in films as being the 'underdogs' or the ones dealing with "loneliness", singing a mournful "song", or having a "dream" that they have to overcome many hardships to get to. Their dreams are "deferred / overlong" and they are romanticized and it the same time belittled in the films that show them in these stereotypical roles.

"Not a Movie" touches on the reality of being a colored person. It exemplifies all of the real brutalities that colored people had to endure and they are not romanticized whatsoever. The protagonist of the poem is running for his life and never has the ability to stop; he is abused and fleeing and has no other choice.

These three poems together tell a story and have a message: that the colored person's life in the time alluded to is nothing like the ones exhibited in the movies. In fact, the movies get it quite wrong. Colored people are stereotyped and alienated and these three poems seek to set the record straight. This is a message I could not have come to without reading the poems in sequence and in relation to one another.

The protagonist in the third poem uses the nighttime as his window to escape.