Broken Dreams My luggage is packed Got nowhere to go My dreams have left So long ago Waiting for their return While seeing them burn As the smoke fades away The pain spreads every day My Life is on hold I’m frozen in time It looks cloudy But the weather is fine No need to rush No one will miss me Watching my world crush Like failure is guaranteed My next destination No time to rest Only broken dreams Taken over by emptiness My luggage is packed Got nowhere to go My dreams have left So long ago Rationale (396) While I was writing my poem, I was inspired by Fitzgerald’s way of ending the novel with Gatsby being shot in the back. All his dreams suddenly just disappear with one pull of the trigger. I wrote this poem from Gatsby’s perspective for that particular scene. In my eyes F. Scott Fitzgerald wanted to display how it doesn’t take much for all your dreams to burst in a matter of seconds. I feel like through his novel I could see how Fitzgerald perhaps tried to incorporate personal experiences with broken dreams into his work. In Broken Dreams, I wanted to emulate the last dramatic scene of the novel, where Gatsby is shot by George. I got most of my inspiration from one line in Chapter eight, page 161 “-until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come”. I was very inspired by this particular line because Nick Carraway really highlighted how unexpected it happened and how not even Gatsby saw it coming. How his dreams, his biggest desire, and only goal, vanished with a pull of a trigger. The quote mentioned particularly inspired me for the first three stanzas where I used lines like “Waiting for their return, While seeing them burn” and “My Life is on hold, I’m frozen in time”. These lines especially were inspired by this because they show no one can see the moment coming, when their dreams crush and how you feel when you experience that. While writing my poem my biggest focus was on having a good flow throughout the lines, but at the same time having a relation to the novel that makes sense to the reader. I used a specific format for my poem. I did that to make it easier for the reader to understand and make it as simple as possible, but at the same time make sure it has a deep meaning and make the reader think about it. Additionally, I used many metaphors throughout this text. One of the biggest metaphors is travel. I used travel as a main metaphor because it clearly emphasizes the vanishing of dreams. Another metaphor I used in the third stanza was the weather. I used it metaphorically to say that dreams are like the weather, they are untouchable but very real.
