Mother to Son Poetry Response

My very first impression of the poem Mother to Son by Langston Hughes was that it was a poem that was highly focused around a mother's extremely negative situation. However, she was still trying to look at everything in a positive light and prepare her son that the same thing could happen to him if he is not careful. I realized after reading this poem over many times that the mother in the poem reminds me a lot of my own mom. This is not because my mom has a miserable life, rather when bad things do happen to her she always tries really hard to see the positive side of the situation. Something I really like about this poem is the way the poet uses vivid imagery and strong symbolism. The line, “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” is a great use of imagery. Symbolism is shown as the staircase is used to represent hardships. The first question I would ask the poet would be, is this poem about something that happened in their own life? I would ask this question because I believe it would be interesting to know if the author was ever in the position of the mother or the son in the poem. In addition, the next thing I would want to know would be, why the poet chose to use slang in their poem? This is interesting to me because in my opinion, Mother to Son has a very serious topic and I wondered when reading to myself if there was a reason why the mother did not use proper English. After that I would want to know why the author chose not to use stanzas? The reason I would want to know this is because I am very interested if there was an intentional purpose in not categorizing the lines. I believe the final line in the poem ”I’se still climbin’, And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” is very powerful. Therefore, for my last question I would want to ask the poet to tell me about any hardship that they experienced in their own life. I would want to hear them speak about this because everyone has something they have to deal with and it seems to me the mother is a very strong character despite what has happened to her. In my opinion, this could very well also be the personality of the poet and I would like to know how they choose to deal with their own challenges in life.