I Said, "Eat Your Eggs"

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? 
- Harlem by Langston Hughes (1951)

     I distinctly recall the first time I read this poem; I was in ninth grade when I came across the text whilst idly flipping through my English textbook. The words "fester" and "rotten" are what initially caught my attention and prompted me to read the entire poem. However, it left me dissatisfied with its paradoxical lines. How could a dream crust like a nasty wound but still be sweet? And what was meant by a dream "dry[ing] up like a raisin in the sun"?
     I forgot about them eventually, but these questions were abruptly brought back when we began reading Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun in English class. The title of the play (as I'm sure you've noticed by now) comes from a line in Hughes' poem.
     In Act I scene i, we as readers are already exposed to many dreams that have been deferred; Walter wants to open a liquor shop with his buddies, Walter's mother dreams of purchasing a house with a "little garden in the back" and Beneatha wants to become a doctor in a male-dominated field (45). All of these seem to be pipe dreams, destined to wither up. It's not practical to waste money on a shop or a house, and, according to Walter, Beneatha should just "go be a nurse like other women" or "just get married and be quiet" (38).
     Perhaps the most powerful, heart-wrenching lines, however, come from Walter in response to his wife's skepticism and command to "eat [his] eggs":
     Man say to his woman: I got me a dream. His woman say: Eat your eggs. Man say: I got to take hold of this world baby! And woman will say: Eat your eggs and go to work. Man say: I got to change my life, I'm choking to death baby! And his women say - Your eggs is getting cold!
     As I read these words yesterday I could picture a tired man who craves something better than the life he has lead, but who has little power to change it. It was in this moment my initial questions from years ago were finally answered; a "dream deferred" is the indescribable feeling of being slowly stifled to death with no way out. -MC

The Youngers' dreams are left to shrivel.