Mother To Son By Langston Hughes

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The poem,"Mother to Son," by Langston Hughes is a poem discussing the uphill battle everyone faces called life. It is told in the perspective of a mother teaching her son that life is a staircase. The entire poem is an extended metaphor that describes her life as an unsteady staircase that she climbs everyday. The poem was written during the civil rights period of time so African Americans ultimately had a harder time than whites did. Many people can infer that the speaker and her son are African Americans who are struggling an uphill battle with the civil rights movement. The speaker gets to the point of the poem quite quickly by acknowledging that her life has not been as easy as most. She purposely uses specific diction in order