Who Is Langston Hughes '' Mother To Son'?

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words” (Frost). Poems are expressive pieces of literature that immensely impacts the reader with very few words. Langston Hughes’ poem, “Mother to Son” is a poem depicting a conversation had between a mom and her son, warning him about life’s obstacles and the necessity to overcome them. The poem has a universal understanding, although it is particularly reflective of the family’s disadvantages of racism, oppression, and segregation based on the author Langston Hughes and time era. In the poem “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes, the poem’s cognitive theme of surmounting through the discouraging hindrances of life through the elements of literature, such as the speaker,

The relationship between the speaker and the listener is close, as the quote “Well, son, I’ll tell you:” (Hughes 1) can show that they were having conversation beforehand and she is simply responding. They are not two strangers, and the conversation is in common vernacular of the time, showing informality. The son seemingly is currently experiencing hardships, and finding it difficult to continue on. “Don’t you set down on the steps/’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard./Don’t you fall now—” (Hughes 15-17). The listener seems passionless in comparison to his mother’s devotion, as she underplays the situation her son is in. She still expresses her message of perseverance regardless of her perception of his life, because she does not want her son to quit. The speaker is the equivalent of the listener’s hope; without someone or something urging a person to persist, the action of continuing down the path of life during times of hardships can be almost impossible to accomplish. Langston Hughes’ himself faced hardships that made him feel hopeless. At the age of seventeen, he reached a breaking point, “I began to be very sorry for myself…I was lonesome. I began to wish I had never been born… One day, when there was no one in the house but me, I put the pistol to my head and held it there, loaded, a long time, and wondered if I would be any happier if I were to pull the trigger.” (Hughes, 164). Similarly to the listener in the story, Hughes wavered and almost sacrificed his life from the pressures of society and the circumstances of racism and oppression. His grandmother had passed away and he had no one else to help guide him through the pain and misery. However, he proceeded on with life, and overcame the obstacles of