Both Aretha Franklin's song "Respect" and Langston Hughes' poem "A Dream Deferred" are eloquent statements for the need for people, specifically people of African-American origins, to receive respect from others for their accomplishments, their contribution to society and to others, and their needs as human beings. Hughes' poem is a poem of quiet rage, eventually boiling over into an imagined explosion. It uses poetic techniques, mainly a series of striking similes phrased as a series of questions to convey its meaning. In contrast, Franklin's song shows how music and a singer's delivery of a simple phrase can make a word into a song of power. Both Hughes and Franklin "sock it" to the reader or listener, one with poetic language, the other with colloquial language reinforced by powerful vocal technique.
             The medium of print allows for a more complex use of diction and vocabulary, as evidenced in Hughes' poem. A poet can assume the reader will take time to read and reflect over the verse. Unlike Franklin, who speaks in the voice of the 'I,' Hughes speaks in an objective voice, musing about the various fates of the deferred dreams of a collective people. Does a dream, he wonders, dry up like a raisin in the sun, extinguished of life, or run (presumably a reference to how slaves ran, seeking freedom). Franklin's song, in contrast, begins with a direct address by her, as a woman, to her "mister" in ordinary, common-sense words, like a woman might speak to her man when he comes home. "Baby, I got it," she says. Like the dreamers of the Hughes poem, Franklin has "got it," she has got a dream to be respected, but she asserts her right to demand respect in exchange for the gifts she offers in very plainspoken language, without much use of metaphor or simile.
             Interestingly, both works about aspirations to be respected and valued use...