And places with no carpet on the floor-

‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard;

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Langston Hughes’ poem "Mother to son" shows a mother’s passion to make her son’s life better than her own. It is a dramatic monologue (a poem in which one perso

The tone of the poem shows the desperation and despair that the mother has felt in her life. Yet, she still believes that life is worth the journey. She still believes that "at the top of the stair" there is a reward, either in heaven or success in this life. The tone indicates the mother’s courage and her perseverance. It is the intentions of her feelings that proves her resourcive strength in her son’s life

The diction in the poem is the language of an uneducated black woman who probably emigrated from the south to the north, where she lives in a tenement building in a ghetto. Words that give her background away include I’se, ain’t, ‘cause, and the clipped ‘g’ in words such as climbin’, and goin’. Her grammatical errors also expose her background. She uses set instead of sit, and no instead of any. Despite the mother’

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