Analysis Of Mother To Son By Langston Hughes

The Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of African-American art in throughout the United States was a cultural eruption of art, music, poetry and literature. These emerging media were unique to the zeitgeist of African-Americans. It provided creative outlets for the disenfranchised, and the expression of their everyday plight, their reality. It is arguable that no other poet best captured the will and determination of his people better than Langston Hughes. His use of imagery, repetition and wordplay seizes the mundane and transforms it into elegance and dignity. The most masterful example of Hughes’ craft is found in his poem Mother to Son. It is a simple concept: a mother’s honest lesson of persistence to her son. There is no specific struggle
He may womanize and drink on Saturdays as an escape, but he pays the bills and provides for his child, and he goes to church every Sunday. It is through this religious devotion that another theme of hope and dignity surfaces in Hughes’ writing. The speaker compares the brass spittoons to the “cymbals of King David’s dancers” and the “wine cups of Solomon.” In doing so, Hughes has turned the mundane into something sacred, “a bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord.” Hughes has perhaps connected David, the boy who slayed Goliath, to the struggle of the marginalized “boy” and his white oppressors. More pertinent is the fact that the speaker never loses his connection to his god. In the times of slavery to the Civil Rights Act and the present day, the salvation of religion and the hope of the afterlife mollified the harsh reality of life on Earth. The speaker rationalizes that he can at least offer “a clean bright spittoon all newly polished” for “altar of the Lord.” In doing so, he likens his servitude as a spittoon cleaner as servitude for his god therefore dignifying the work. The last line – repetition with difference – might be heard from both his employer and his god. “Com’mere, boy!” becomes both a reminder of the constant, tiring work and the call of
While both of these poems offer a similar them of persistence through hardships, they vary in their perspective and the reasoning behind each narrator’s persistence. In following the “Blues idiom,” Hughes took the mundane details out of everyday life, and connected to nobler ideals. There is dignity within the way each speaker continues despite the struggle. Hughes’ use of rhythm and elegance exemplifies beauty and expression in Blues poetry. Where other poets might have used a more “weary” method or some sad semblance of humor to own their struggle, Hughes shines through as one whose characters embody the determinism and grit needed to overcome it. It was this spirit of determinism in the face of the “low-down dirty shame” that fueled not only Hughes, but many other poets of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. It was Hughes’ “dream deferred” that fueled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to reach the top of the mountain, the “Promised Land.” It was the rhythm of the Blues that swayed people’s bodies, hearts, and minds, but it was the rhythm of words that called them to