The Dream Keeper and Other Poems

The Dream Keeper and Other Poems by Langston Hughes is a poetry collection for 9 year olds, picked out by the poet himself for young readers.

What happens

Hughes put it together in 1932 and it's the only book of verse he made for children. This edition carries seven more he wrote later.

The poems are short. Plenty are four lines (Dreams runs to eight and no further). That's the whole reason it works at this age, because a child can finish one, look up, and want the next.

They come in groups by mood rather than by subject. Weather and dreams first, then the sea, then blues songs, then prayers, then poems about his own people and his own country.

Some are simply lovely to say out loud. Let the rain kiss you. How thin and sharp is the moon tonight. There's a snail dreaming his way along, and a little house made of sugar with a maple-sugar child peeping out of the window.

Then there's Mother to Son, a mother telling her boy that life for her ain't been no crystal stair, and don't you turn back. If your reader keeps one poem out of this book, it'll probably be that one.

The blues poems are in dialect and are meant to be heard rather than decoded. Hughes even stops and explains what a blues song is before he gives you five of them. Read those aloud together rather than leaving a nine-year-old alone with the spelling.

Now the part you'll want before you open it. These poems are more than ninety years old and they use the language of their time, including the word Negro throughout. Some say very plainly what was being done to Black Americans. Four lines tell you the Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo, they lynch me now in Texas. Another is a child at a carnival asking where the Jim Crow section is on a merry-go-round.

None of it is described in detail. None of it is softened either, and a child will ask. If you're ready for those questions, this is one of the great ways in. If you'd rather wait a year, it'll keep.

What to read next

For a story set in the Harlem these poems came out of, Some Places More Than Others is in the library too. Amara goes there to meet her father's family, with a list of places she wants to see and Hughes's house on it.