Choose one of the similes in "Harlem" and explain how it helps the reader understand what happens to a deferred dream.

I wonder if you have perhaps become slightly confused
between literary terms in this question. Unfortunately, this excellent poem by Langston
Hughes contains no similes. However, it does contain metaphors, and I wonder if this is
what your question is referring to. Similes and metaphors are very similar in likening
an object, place or character to something else, but similes use the words "like" or
"as" to do this, whereas metaphors assert the comparison
directly.

Note how this operates in a repeated metaphor in
this short poem:

So we stand
here

On the edge of hell

In
Harlem

Here, a metaphor is
used to compare Harlem to "the edge of hell," obviously relating the impoverishment and
lack of rights that Afro-Americans were experiencing at the time with hell. I suppose
the "deferred dream" that your question refers to is the dream of what such
Afro-Americans would like or imagine America to look like in terms of racial equality.
Their imaginings of a world free from racism, where Afro-Americans are able to get jobs
in spite of the colour of their skin, is a dream that is necessarily deferred because of
the immense prejudice and racism that existed at the time, which is reinforced through
the metaphor analysed above.