mother to son : Critical Overview

Commentators on “Mother to Son” tend to focus on either racial, religious, or feminist themes for the poem’s forms. Chidi Ikonne, writing in the collection Langston Hughes, suggests that this and other poems by Hughes present a stance of “stability which, ironically, has developed from the instability of the speaker’s experience” in a racist society. Emphasizing religious themes, R. Baxter Miller, in his 1989 book The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes, argues that the mother in this poem is a “figure of mythic ascent” who is struggling to “merge with Godhead.” Miller argues that “we find in her less a progression of the body than an evolution of the soul.” With a similar emphasis on religious symbolism, Onwuchekwa Jemie refers to the mother as a “Black Madonna” in his book Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry.

Other critics illuminate the poem’s feminist elements. Critic James Emanuel, in his 1967 book Langston Hughes, notes that “Mother to Son” is among the first of many of Hughes’s poems to portray a strong matriarch. R. Baxter Miller also discusses the symbolic role of women and mothers in Hughes’s poetry. Miller argues that Hughes’s female speakers represent archetypes, or original models, of human “endurance, mortality, [and] marital desertion.” In this poem, the woman also represents the continuation of the race. Having given life to the next generation (her son), raised him, and persisted in her struggles for his sake and that of future generations, the mother represents a figure of female strength, affirmation, and generational continuity.

Still other critics focus on the poem’s lyric elements. James Baldwin, a major African-American writer contemporary with Hughes, commented that “Hughes is at his best in lyrics like ‘Mother to Son’ and ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’.” The poem’s lyric elements include a first person speaker, an expression of intense personal emotion, and a belief in spiritual transcendence of time and earthly circumstance.