The opening stanza (lines 1-6) introduces the poem's speaker and hints at its central conflict.
The title ("As I Grew Older") has already suggested that this is a mature speaker reflecting on their youth. The first two lines reinforce this idea by reflecting on the past: "It was a long time ago. / I have almost forgotten my dream." Right away, this seems to be a poem about disappointment—about lost ideals, hopes, or aspirations. Yet the simile that follows suggests that the speaker's old "dream" lingers vividly in their memory:
But it was there then,
In front of me,
Bright like a sun,—
My dream.
It's not stated outright what this "dream" is, but it boils down to the vision of a better life—the life the speaker hoped to lead. This vision was once a guiding light for them, like "a sun": something powerful, central, and sustaining. It hovered "in front of [them]," as if ripe for the taking, back when their whole life lay in front of them. Already, though, it seems as if this vision slipped away as they "Grew Older." (Many of Langston Hughes's most famous poems concern the necessity of dreams in human lives, and the agony of thwarted or "deferred" dreams; see the Context section of this guide for more.)
This first stanza establishes that the poem is written in free verse (it contains no rhyme scheme or meter). Every line is end-stopped; that is, it breaks after a grammatical pause indicated by a comma, period, or other punctuation. (This pattern will hold until the last stanza, which contains two enjambments.)
The poem takes its form from the natural flow of the speaker's thoughts rather than a conventional poetic pattern, so the language sounds organic, almost conversational. The punctuation ending each line, however, makes the language seem somewhat reined in or confined—appropriate to a poem about harsh limitations.