Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance began in the poor urban neighborhood of Harlem in New York City. The Harlem Renaissance is known as a time period in which African-American artist, writers, and poets explored Black America and its history. The movement beginning in the 1920s, challenged racism and white paternalism. Many of the poets associated with this movement; Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes; often wrote about life through the eyes of the African-American. Although the Harlem Renaissance ended in the 1930s the aspects of African American culture and identity that began and grew during this movement are still prevalent today. Click the button below to read Langston Hughes's poem Mother to Son.
Poem Analysis
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In Langston Hughes's poem Mother to Son, Hughes writes from the perspective of an African-American mother telling her son how to overcome the many obstacles that life presents. The time period in which this poem was written as well as Hughes's childhood leads one to believe that the challenges that the mother in the poem had to conquer were racism, sexism, and life as a single mother. The use of metaphor in lines 2-6 of Mother to Son let the reader as well as the son know that life for the mother has been onerous. When reading lines 2-6 I imagined, an African-American mother searching for a job to support herself and her son, but she is constantly turned away because of her skin color and because of her gender. Lines 12 & 13 suggest that the mother had to commit acts, that she would later be ashamed of, in order to achieve a brighter future for herself as well as for her son. Although her life has been complicated the mother lets her son know that you should always persevere no matter how hard life gets (Lines 14-19). I think Hughes's goal is to emphasis the importance of endurance, Hughes does not give any indication that life will get easier, however the message is to keep pushing even in hopeless situations.
Literary Devices
- The poem Mother to Son is an extended metaphor. The use of this extended metaphor is to compare the difficulties people must endure in life to the difficulty of climbing up a broken down staircase. Hughes probably compared life to stairs to emphasis the concept of endurance. In his poem Hughes highlights the fact that no matter how hard life gets the mother keeps going even though she does not know what the future holds for her and for her son.
- In line 16 of his poem Hughes uses the literary device colloquialism. Line 16 is an example of a colloquialism because the use of the word "kinder". The word "kinder" is the informal way to say the words kind of, the word "kinder" also represents the informal dialect of a certain region of the United States (maybe down south in a state like Alabama or far east in Massachusetts). During the time period in which Hughes wrote Mother to Son African-Americans were striving to create their own cultural identity, seeing as many Blacks had a certain dialect Hughes may have wanted the African-American community to be able to identify with his poem.