The poem opens with the number one through eight scattered across the page. in at least 75 words, discuss what this might mean.

awnser: alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia.

the bundle of the sticks, talks about union and how sometimes people need a different point of view. when the father in this story asked his sons to break the bunch of sticks, they could not, but when they grabbed one stick each, it was easier for them to break, because they worked together.

in hofus the stonecutter shows a simple happy working man, but one day when he delivers a load of stone into the house of a rich man, he wishes to be a rich man as well and so the mountain spirit grants him that wish and many others, until he realizes that even getting all his desires and wishes come true, he just needed to be humble and have genuine reason to live and be a better man each day.

the major theme of langston hughes’s montages of a dream deferred is the deferred, or delayed, american dream of african americans. the poem is about how african americans failed to achieve their goals in time:

this year, maybe, do you think i can graduate?

i’m already two years late.dropped out six months when i was seven,

a year when i was eleven,

then got put back when we come north.

to get through high high school at twenty's kind of late–

but maybe this year i can graduate.

the poem also depicts how african americans had to keep postponing their needs with a hope that someday they would be able to obtain what they desired:

maybe now i can have that white enamel stove

i dreamed about when we first fell in love

eighteen years ago.

but you know,

rooming and everything

then kids,

cold-water flat and all that.

but now my daughter’s married

and my boy's most grown–

quit school to work

and where we're moving

there ain't no stove–

maybe i can buy that white enamel stove!

however, despite their deferred dreams, the poem shows the refusal of african americans to give up easily and let go of their dreams of a better life. their dreams may have been delayed, but they did not lose hope.

is the answer

it would be nice to see the passage but with my understanding of the word oxymoron they speaker is saying that love is contradictory.