Final AP Lit Blog.......Ever!

Oh, blogging. How I won't miss you. It's not that blogging this year was the absolute worst thing that could have ever happened to me, cause it wasn't. Blogging more so wasn't my favorite thing due to the fact tha it was so tedious! Sitting, and thinking, and waiting, and thinking......it literally felt like forever until I finally was able to come up with something I wanted to say. Maybe, in the future, I'll turn into the blogging type; however, at the moment I've come to the conclusion that blogging simply isn't for me and I'm ready to have it off my back! This year has been filled with various blogs; blogs on summer reading, blogs on the books we've read in class, blogs on movies......the options were endless. Yet, through all of the topics one could have gone through in an attempt to make sure they'd completed the assignment by the last day of the month, one type of blog that always seemed to stay constant were the blogs that revolved around poems. One thing I've appreciated about blogging is the fact that I was able to find myself a favorite poet; if you can't tell by now, I happen to really fancy the poems written by Langston Hughes. I'm not specifically sure why, but something about his poetry is truly lyrical and makes me feel as if I'm listening to spoken word at a jazz club or something (nerdy, I know). So, I thought to myself, what better way then to end off the AP Lit blogs than with a poem by none other than Langston himself! My final selection was the poem "Harlem"; it goes like this:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore-

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over-

Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I like this poem a lot due to the fact that it seems to currently reflect on our lives as we're leaving for college. A lot of us may not be going to the college of our choice due to lurking reasons (finances, not getting accepted, never actually applied, etc) and may begin to feel as if our dreams are becoming deferred or will never come true. This poem asks the questions I think most of us wonder when our dreams are actually deferred. Do our dreams shrink up like a raisin? or doe they simply become sweeter over time? No one knows. This poem addresses the idea of the feared unknown that is honestly one's life. No one knows how they're life will turn out, and when things don't happen at the exact moment that we want them to, people tend to freak out and stress over their beloved dreams. Within this poem Langston makes it clear that humans, regardless of their background story, want to accomplish the same things in life. When people feel as if their out of control of their own destiny they begin to feel as if they're dreams will never come true and fear of what their life will actually become. Ya feel me?