In one of his earliest poems, Mother to Son, Langston Hughes tells his readers that one must have courage and determination to overcome the hurdles of life. This poem is most well known for its dramatic usage of monologue and symbolism of “crystal stairs.” However, the poem also uses other literary devices such as metaphors, repetition, and dialect to create a certain characteristic, impression, and image. Of all the different techniques and literary devices manipulated by Langston Hughes, I would like to discuss his use of age, gender, and memory in uncovering multi-layered meanings of Mother to Son.
On the surface, the poem is a monologue of a weary mother telling her son about struggles in life, as portrayed in the title. Why did Hughes choose to use a mother’s voice instead of a father’s in this poem? I take the absence of the father in the poem as a clue. Such absence and the speaker’s narrative about her struggles possibly imply one of many struggles that the son in the poem is going to experience and further the speaker’s own struggle of raising a child and dealing with harsh reality without a husband. Considering such a complex situation, the narrator’s age and gender adds a story to what the poem is telling and sets the mood and tone. Furthermore, age and gender characterize the entire poem by creating the narrator’s mother-like voice. This combined with the use of dialect in the poem, Hughes successfully created a certain impression of the narrator: a warm, approachable, middle-aged woman with no formal education but plenty of life experience and wisdom. Through such manipulation of the speaker’s age and gender, Hughes is telling a personal struggle of a mother and further offering encouragement and life adv...
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...iable literary devices such as symbolism, metaphor, repetition, and language, Hughes uses age, gender, and memory to set the tone, create a voice, and a unifying theme of overcoming struggles with determination and courage. The age and gender of the speaker in this poem is especially significant in that they do not only set the tone, but also give voices to the most dominant and important theme of the poem—the collective memory of African-Americans. Therefore, Hughes’ use of age, gender, and memory turns Mother to Son into something more than a short narrative poem of a weary, worried mother giving life advices to her son.
Works Cited
"Collective memory -." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Web. 19 Feb. 2010.
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Hughes, Langston. “Mother to Son.” Collected poems of Langston Hughes. New York:
Vintage, 1995.
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“The Mother” (Gwendolyn Brooks) has three stanza has and aabbccdd etc. rhyming scheme that is called couplets. The first stanza The first stanza started of “abortions will not let you forget” (Gwendolyn Brooks) this is a strong statement that supported the theme of this poem. Then Brooks go on and telling how the mother did not get to hold the child that she aborted and how sad it was for her.
Form and meaning are what readers need to analyze to understand the poem that they are evaluating. In “Mother to Son”, his form of writing that is used frequently, is free verse. There is no set “form”, but he gets his point across in a very dramatic way. The poem is told by a mother who is trying to let her son know that in her life, she too has gone through many frustrations just like what her son is going through. The tone of this poem is very dramatic and tense because she illustrates the hardships that she had to go through in order to get where she is today. She explains that the hardships that she has gone through in her life have helped her become the person that she has come to be. Instead of Hughes being ironic, like he does in some of his poems, he is giving the reader true background on the mother’s life. By introducing the background, this helps get his point across to the reader in a very effective way. In this poem there are many key words which help portray the struggles that the mother is trying to express to her son. The poem is conveyed in a very “down to earth” manner. An example of this is, “Life for me ain’t been a crystal stair (462).” This quote shows the reader that the mom is trying to teach the son a lesson with out sugar coating it. She wants her son to know that throughout her life has had many obstacles to overcome, and that he too is going to have to get through his own obstacles no matter how frustrating it is. Her tone throughout the poem is stern telling the boy, “So boy, don’t turn your back (462).” The poems tone almost makes the reader believe that the mother is talking to them, almost as if I am being taught a valuable lesson.