Stairway to Heaven

“Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes is a poem about continuing through life even when there is an obstacle, using a staircase as a metaphor.  Specifically, it’s a mother telling her son that her life wasn’t easy and neither will his, so he must persevere and keep going. To be precise, it’s about the struggles of living in a society with underlying racism and how a black mother has already experienced what it’s like to live with systemic racism and she has to tell her child that because of his race he will automatically be less fortunate the others and face a more difficult life because of that systemic racism. The underlying meaning of this poem is especially pertinent in the current U.S. In fact, just yesterday a video of a black man being suffocated by a police officer over a non-violent offense surfaced, this wasn’t a one time thing either and it happens way too often especially for a 21st century society. This is the real meaning behind the poem, that the son needed to be told that not only is life hard in the first place, but because of the color of your skin it will be that much harder.

At first, the poem seems like a simple one, it seems as if it were a more pessimistic approach to life, the opposite of our first poem of the week, which detailed ideal qualities, however this poem refers to the fact that you have to get back up and continue, when life has you down. It uses the metaphor of the stairway to represent life and how there are cracks, chips, and other blemishes in the staircase, displaying the obstacles of life in a physical form. In a way, I like to consider it a stairway to heaven, because it resembles life, so you could think that you’re climbing to heaven with the staircase, and at the end of the staircase you’d consider that death and then whatever you believe in will happen, for my example I used heaven. The most interesting line from the poem is, “And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,” this, I feel, refers to the fact that variety is the spice of life, it’s not completely see through, like a crystal stair, but it’s all in the grey, and that’s what’s so great about it. Overall, this poem is a great big metaphor for life, describing systemic racism, obstacles of life, and what makes it so great.