a role to emphasize the activities and describe the persona‟ feelings when he or
she is listening to a jazz music. In these two poems, the writer figures out the multiple negation and subject displacements as a means of emphasizing the
persona‟s activities and describing the persona‟s feelings.
b. To Portray American Dream
The second purpose of the author is to portray American Dream. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the term American Dream refers to a better and richer life
for everyone, and also the opportunity for each American in line with their ability or achievement Truslow, 1931. Hughes sees this term and puts it as one of the
concerns in writing his poem as he saw the unfair life of African-American people at that time.
The writer figures out ten poems containing twenty one syntactic deviations which are used to portray the American Dream. The titles of the poems
are: 1 My People, 2 When Young Spring Comes, 3 Wide River, 4 Good Morning Revolution, 5 Free Man, 6 Madam‟s Calling Card, 7 Yesterday and
Today, 8 Stranger in Town, 9 Deferred, and 10 Evening Song. Among those ten poems, the writer picks four poems to be discussed further.
The first poem to be discussed is a poem entitled “My People”. This poem
discusses someone who has a fair judgment on African-American. The persona wants to tell the readers that African-American is also as good as American. The
persona personates the African-American as a night sky full of stars and a sun in a daytime. The poem can be read in datum 31SD01.
The writer only found subject displacements in this poem. They are found in the sentence Beautiful, also, is the sun and Beautiful, also, are the souls of my
people. However, the subject displacements are used to emphasize the goodness of African-American at that time. It shows that African-American should have the
same treatments as they are also good. They have good qualities to be „something‟ in the society. Hughes wanted to show that they can achieve the American Dream
at that time. The second poem is entitled
“Wide River”. The poem tells about the speaker who wants to reach his dream, something he really needs but there is no
hope for him. The poem can be read in datum 109SD01. The poem contains multiple negations. This can be seen from the sentence An I aint got no boat and
I aint got no boat. These two sentences described a condition where African- American people did not have any chance to reach American Dream. They cannot
do anything for that since they are not given any chance; they do not have boat to cross the boundaries at that era. Thus, the multiple negations are used to
emphasize the unreachable dream of African-American at that time as they do not have any chance for it.
The third poem is entitled “Good Morning Revolution”. Hughes writes
this poem to personify revolution as a close friend of a poet who is struggling as a worker to make a decent salary while he sees his boss living fine and eating well.
The poem can be read in datum 35SD02. The poem is written as a means of demanding a revolution. Hughes writes this poem to portray that the African-
American workers receive poor treatments from their boss. Their boss who is
