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Langston HughesA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
While the poem “Mother to Son” is a speech of encouragement for the speaker’s son, she spends most of the poem describing hardship. The speaker does not expound on the bountiful future that awaits her son if he continues his ascent, nor does she describe any kind of reward as the ultimate goal. In fact, she discusses no goal whatsoever; the poem is not concerned with rewards or ultimate goals. It is concerned with maintaining strength to endure the hard times. The speaker does not minimize the difficulty of this climb; suffering features more vividly than hope or perseverance. The speaker wants not only to inspire her son, but to describe her difficult life: “It’s had tacks in it, / And splinters” (Lines 4-5). She uses tacks and splinters as a metaphor for the obstacles she’s overcome and the pain these difficulties have caused her, like a needle or a splinter through the foot. However, rather than focusing only on active injury or affliction, the poem presents a vision of hardship that encompasses a totality of suffering, and the extended metaphor speaks also to the pain of deficit and privation. She describes places on the stairs with no carpet, nothing to cushion her steps on this rickety staircase: “And places with no carpet on the floor— / Bare” (Lines 5-6).
By Langston Hughes
Children’s Rhymes
Langston Hughes
Cora Unashamed
Langston Hughes
Dreams
Langston Hughes
Harlem
Langston Hughes
I look at the world
Langston Hughes
I, Too
Langston Hughes
Let America Be America Again
Langston Hughes
Me and the Mule
Langston Hughes
Mulatto
Langston Hughes
Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
Not Without Laughter
Langston Hughes
Slave on the Block
Langston Hughes
Thank You, M'am
Langston Hughes
The Big Sea
Langston Hughes
Theme for English B
Langston Hughes
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
Langston Hughes
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Langston Hughes
The Ways of White Folks
Langston Hughes
The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes
Tired
Langston Hughes