A Staircase called Life

The poem Mother to Son by Langston Hughes is a very interesting piece of writing filled with an excellent tone/mood and great types of figurative language. The tone of Mother to Son is very calming as if it was a real mother to her son, there is no yelling or screaming, just a nice calming tone of a mother telling her son not to give up on life and keep trotting up those stairs and don’t turn around. That tone extends through the entire poem and it causes the reader to actually sense the feeling of the woman’s voice who is talking to her son nicely in a calming voice. The theme of this story would have to be perseverance because the mother is talking about the obstacles that you will need to face in your life. By the tone and the theme of this poem you can tell that the mother has had a very hard life, and she probably was a slave, but as the character says in this poem is that even if life has you pinned down and wanting and making you try to give up, you don’t because it will all turn over in the end and life will go on.

In this poem there is one great example of figurative language, and it is a metaphor which happens to be “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” The mother is basically saying life isn’t as easy as it seems there will be major obstacles for you to overcome in your life and troubles you will have to go through but she is saying keep on moving up those stairs, it will all soon pay off. I’m going to compare that sentence that the author said about the crystal stair, and relate it to the quote “The universe tends to unfold as it should” because the mother is stating that life will go on and there will be a light at the end of the tunnel. The mother just wants her son to know even if you get the worst job, or even the worst thing in life, it will all be okay so don’t stop walking up those stairs and keep walking until you’ve reached the end of the hard but beautiful staircase that we call life.