Diction refers to the poet’s choice of words. Poets differ than the readers in the sense that they are exceptionally careful with the words they use. They tell us more about the characters, events or the setting via the words they select. In “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes, a deeper look into the words reveals further detail about the mother that is talking to her son. We learn things that the poem does not say directly. Every poem has a speaker.
Even though it is possible that a poem can have several speakers, most of them have only one. “Mother to Son” is no exception in this sense.
The poem is about a mother talking to her son, teaching him about life. As the poem sounds as if it was coming right out of the mother’s mouth, we can say that the mother that is talking to her son is the speaker in this poem. She tells him the difficulties she has faced and warns him about those.
Just like every mother, she wants her son to live successfully. The mother encourages her son to never give up.
Diction in this poem tells us significant details about the mother and her life. The second line, she compares life to a stair. This indicates the different stages of human life and mentions that it gets harder along the way. On some steps, she finds herself in utter darkness and tells her son to never go back, no matter how dark it gets.
Darkness here may be indicating that she has gotten confused and did not know what to do at some stages but kept going on.
Throughout the poem, the diction tells us more details about the mother. Words and phrases such as “landin””, “I’se”, “goin”” and “ain’t been no” indicate that the mother is a black person. Some of the difficulties she has faced may or may not be related to her race, we are not told about that. The poem has a “warning” meaning in almost every line. This may indicate that her days are coming to an end.
She compares life to stairs and talks abo rs therefore she is old. There is a chance that this is why she is about to die and warns her boy. ut the difficulties she has faced right after. We can assume that she finds it hard to climb stairs.
The explanations given above show that by taking a deeper look at poet’s choice of words, we can infer new information about the characters. We are not told directly that she is old but we can infer that. We are not told directly that she is black but the language used in the poem indicates that. Diction is one of the most significant aspects of poetry and we should always keep in mind that poets pick their words very carefully.
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