Literary Analysis Of Mother To Son By Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes wrote "Mother to Son" when he was 21 years old and published it in 1994. He structures the poem as a dialogue between a mother and her son. It is free verse and written in a dialect, meaning that it mimics the patterns of speech and diction of conversation. The mother begins by telling her son how hard her life has been – it has not been a "crystal stair." Then the poet Hughes develops the metaphor of a staircase further, as the materfamilias describes the challenges in her life using symbols like tacks, splinters, uncarpeted floor, and dark, unlit corners. She encourages her son not to turn back, because she never will.
The poem starts out by saying "Well, son, I tell you" and by that the audience can tell that the author is a mother and the audience is her son. In the next line of the poem the mother states "Life for me ain 't been no crystal stair." This illustrates that her life has not been this fancy beautiful dream that she had picture as she was growing up. The mother had been through some tough times that she does not

Everyone goes through tough dark times but if they keep moving forward then the light will shine at one point in their life. When she tells he son not to look back she is trying to protect him and say move forward because I will not be looking back either. The mother is saying to her son that he needs to keep climbing stairs and keep his head held high so he doesn 't take a step back but continue to move forward with life no matter the challenges. She is letting him know that he can 't just sit down on the stairs and just give up on life. He needs to get up and keep trying even though it is tough sometimes. There are moments that are going to get hard but don 't fall down with because they both have come too far in life to let it bring them back