Langston Hughes Poem

Tone:  The speaker’s tone is matter of fact. She describes calmly the obstacles she faces and has faced, and notes simply that she has continued going.

Word Choice: Hughes employs simple, concrete diction with words like “tacks” and “splinters.” While his subject is lofty, his word choice is not.

Imagery: The poem portrays life’s challenges as a long staircase, one that in the case of the speaker is rough and perhaps dangerous. This is to demonstrate that life can be “kinder hard,” and even though obstacles—“tacks,” “splinters,” “boards torn up,” and so on—exist, the mother urges her son to supersede them.

Style: The speaker speaks in dialect by dropping g’s (i.e. “turnin’”), repeating the word “I’se,” and using words like “ain’t” and “kinder.” This use of dialect helps contribute to the informality of the poem and contextualizes the speaker as a lower-middle class black female.

Theme: The theme of this poem is simple and noncontroversial: despite her own experience of life as a constant, unequal struggle, the mother urges her son to take on that struggle and perservere through obstacles that will arise.

Divisions of the poem:

Our speaker begins by clarifying to whom she speaks—her son, though possibly not her literal son but rather those who follow her and thus for whom she feels some sense of responsibility. Next, she describes what life has been like for her. Interestingly, she uses anaphora to emphasize that life “ain’t been no crystal stair.” While most of her description focuses on what life is—challenging, dangerous, uncertain—this repeated phrase explains what her life is not—perfect.

Next, the poem discusses the speaker’s response to the nature of her life. She has struggled onwards, climbing, reaching landings, and turning corners, all of which represent not only literal steps in the process of climbing stairs but also various different parts of her life.

She ends by advising her son to do the same—to continue to struggle on, even when the struggle is challenging. She has done so, she says, and so he must do the same.

Exploration of the theme:

The theme of hard work and perseverance, that most American of themes, takes on an interesting dimension in this poem insofar as Hughes, a black author, was well aware of the extraordinary challenges black Americans faced in contrast to their white counterparts. Certainly, hard work and getting ahead seems attainable, if difficult, for a white. But for a black, the same challenge, undertaken in a viciously racist society, seems much less realistic. Nevertheless, Hughes exhorts, from the perspective of one black to another, the continued pursuit of success even when challenges make that success so much more difficult than it would be for a white.

My family has not faced the same level of difficulty or discrimination suggested by the poem. Nevertheless, I picked this poem because I value hard work very highly and view one of the responsibilities of government, particularly in the US, as maximizing economic equity (not equality) and thereby allowing all the opportunity to succeed through hard work. Equity is one of the ideals most fundamental to the US and one I personally value very highly.