An effigy is usually made to be destroyed. A crowd builds one, parades it, and sets it alight, and the fire turns private anger into public spectacle. Ram Krishna Singh's "Protest" begins with an effigy that has escaped that ending. The poem asks what becomes of something made for rebellion when it is neither destroyed nor bought.
The first twist comes in the opening lines: "What hangs out there / is the effigy of dreams." We expect an effigy of a tyrant or a villain, but this one stands for dreams. The poem never says whose dreams or whose "ego" is involved, and I think that silence is deliberate. Judging by the wording, someone wanted these dreams burnt, perhaps as a show of power or as proof that they had been given up, and the burning would have "pleased" that person. The dreams refused to go up in flames. They survive only as a stiff, lifeless figure, which is a strange kind of victory.
The verb "hangs" does a lot of work. It suggests a body strung up, with the grim finality of an execution. It also suggests a picture on a wall, something framed and displayed. Both meanings fit, because the second sentence rules out the other possible fate: the effigy could not "be sold / as a piece of art." The line break after "sold" makes the word land with a small thud. The dreams cannot be destroyed to satisfy someone's pride, and they cannot be turned into a product either. They are caught between ritual and market, and nobody wants them.
The form matches this stalled feeling. The poem has two stanzas, one of six lines and one of three, with no rhyme and no punctuation at all. Even the second stanza begins in lowercase ("there's no protest value"), as if the thought simply continues from where the speaker's tired mind left off. The lines are short and plain, close to speech, and the contractions ("couldn't," "there's") keep the tone flat and unshowy. The quiet is effective. A poem called "Protest" might be expected to shout, and this one mutters. A softer sound pattern also holds it together: "dreams," "drawing room" and "derides" all begin with the same d, so the three key ideas in the poem echo one another quietly.
The second stanza turns on a cold, almost commercial verdict: "there's no protest value." "Value" belongs with "sold" and "art" from the first stanza, so even the judgment on the effigy is made in the language of the marketplace. Then comes the setting, "after years in the drawing room." The drawing room is where guests are received and where objects are arranged to be admired. Placing the effigy there suggests that protest, left long enough in comfort, becomes part of the furniture. The anger that made it has cooled, and what remains is a prop that people have stopped noticing.
The last line, "it derides memories," is the sharpest in the poem. The effigy has changed from a symbol of dreams into something that mocks them. The line is ambiguous. It might mean that the effigy ridicules the memory of the original hope, or that it mocks the memory of the protest itself, which no longer has any force. Either way, the poem stops without a full stop, and the sneer is left hanging, just like the effigy.
The poem's significance lies in how much it fits into nine short lines. It names a quiet danger for any act of dissent: it may be silenced less by violence than by time, comfort and indifference. It can also be read more personally, as an image of dreams that were never fulfilled and never given up, kept on display and gradually turning bitter. The poem avoids slogans and names no enemy, and that restraint makes it more unsettling. The protest has already failed by the time we see it, and what we are shown is the object left behind.