Consider the potential tension between the voices of the speakers in the two poems “Mother to Son” and “Motto.”
The narrators of Langston Hughes’s poems “Mother to Son” and “Motto” can generate tension because the narrator of “Mother to Son” talks about the mother’s hardships and all that she has sacrificed to get to her current stage of life. Despite the hardships, the mother continues to fight on. Unliked the mother in “Mother and Son”, the narrator of “Motto” does not go through any hardships. “Dig and be dug in return. ” the narrator sees life and death as a system and only wants to live through life painlessly. His way of survival is to “dig all jive” which means to enjoy everything. The stark differences between both narrators represent two different ways of living life.
I agree! In both poems, the speakers seem to be emphasizing drastically different lifestyles. Knowing that Hughes was a renowned poet during the Harlem Renaissance, I wonder if he had intentionally tried to establish this tension between these two speakers to reflect the different views people held during the Harlem Renaissance itself?