As a part of a recent project, I had to choose a published poem to analyze in a paragraph. We needed to include how word choice and structure affected the tone and theme of the poem. I chose to analyze the poem “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes,  which is about a mother telling her son that life hasn’t been easy for her. She tries to teach her son that even when the going gets tough, you have to keep climbing the staircase of life and persevere through it. My analysis paragraph and the original poem are posted below.

In the poem, “Mother to Son,” the author uses enjambment and punctuation to separate the poem into six individual thoughts. At the end of each line, he uses a comma, colon, hyphen or just breaks off the sentence so that the thought doesn’t end with a period until a couple lines later. For instance, the six lines “But all the time/I’se been a-climbin’ on,/And reachin’ landin’s,/And turnin’ corners,/And sometimes going’ in the dark/Where there ain’t been no light.” are all one idea. This is because, in this excerpt from the poem, only the sixth line ends with a closing punctuation, meaning that all the lines are connected. Even though there is a comma at the end of most of the lines, they still aren’t individual thoughts because a comma in a poem implies that the sentence continues. This helps the emphasize the themes of the poem by separating the lines into sections that each talk about different ideas. Such as how the second thought only talks about how life has had tacks and splinters in it or how the last thought showed how the narrator had persevered through a hard life. The author also gives the narrator an interesting personality and tone by using certain words and contractions. For example, in the last two lines of the poem, the author says “I’se still climbin’/And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” In this sentence, the author chooses to use the word I’se instead of I’m or I am. The author also created a double negative, when he says, “And life ain’t been no crystal stair.” This word choice makes the mother seem older and maybe a little uneducated. This adds to the theme of perseverance by emphasizing how the narrator has had a hard life and maybe isn’t that smart but that she is still going and climbing the staircase. It also emphasizes the lesson the mother is trying to teach her son, that even though life is hard, you have to keep going and can’t give up because there could be something amazing around the corner. As you can see, the author’s use of punctuation and enjambment, as well as their choice of words has influenced the way the reader interprets the theme and meaning behind the poem.