Mother To Son Literary Devices

On the road of life, many obstacles come about that one must overcome to make themself feel complete. The poem “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes was written in 1922. Langston Hughes was a black writer, whose work started to be published in the 1920s. “Mother to Son,” which shows a black mother telling her son to stay hopeful despite all the hardships one may encounter in life. Here the author is passing a message to the public through this woman of wisdom.The mother tells her son that life has not always been easy for her, yet she is still carrying on. This poem “Mother to Son” has many poetry elements within the poem. The poem shows the message of staying hopeful through the obstacles one may encounter throughout life. Hughes uses metaphors,

In line seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen Hughes says, “Don’t you fall now– For I’se still goin’, honey, I’se still climbin’.” What Hughes expresses in these lines is that just because the stairs become hard to climb at times do not quit. One of Hughes’ most important elements is symbols in his poem “Mother to Son.” She still struggles forward, no matter what may have been the bleakest moments of her life, where there seemed to be no hope. When climbing the stairs she is “reachin’ landin’s, / and turnin’ corners, / and sometimes goin’ in the dark”. Even though these are “home like” things someone may face on a staircase, they are actually metaphors that mean things that she has encountered in her life. She says that she reaches landings, which can mean that she has come up on places where she could rest. When she says she turns corners, it is when her life changes and she has to turn away from her original path that it was on. When she says “sometimes goin’ in the dark where there ain’t been no light.” This contrasting color imagery of dark and light shows the idea that it is always dark before the dawn and bad days come before better ones and just when it might seem as if there is no relief in sight, something occurs to get rid of all of your burdens. The mother then advises her son not to give up and let life get him down just because there are a few struggles in