Hughes uses dramatic monologue for this poem, in which the mother directly addresses her son and reveals much about her character in the process. This style adds a powerful emotional immediacy to the verse.

The mother in the poem speaks in a vivid dialect, using the non-standard grammar of her subculture in phrases such as "ain't been no." The flavor of her black world and her religious training also come through in her image of her life not being a crystal staircase, an allusion to the Biblical story of Jacob climbing a stairway to heaven. This idyllic staircase provides a contrast to the many stairs this women has climbed. Hughes uses vivid imagery—description using the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell—to show the roughness of her stairs, which have

splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor

What a wonderful poem.

In Langston Hughes' poem, "Mother to Son," he adopts the voice of a mother speaking to her son about the hardships in life. The primary literary device used here is an extended metaphor.

eNotes.com offers the following definition:

An extended metaphor…establishes a principal subject (comparison) and subsidiary subjects (comparisons).

Another definition, offered by Meyer Literature:

An extended metaphor is a sustained comparison in which part or all of a poem consists of a series of related metaphors.

In this poem, the speaker (the mother) is describing her life, saying:

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

The imagery here is specific. Hughes wants the reader to imagine what a crystal staircase might look like: glittering like diamonds. However, extending the theme of a staircase, the speaker provides images that contradict the idea of beautiful set of stairs with all the things that can be problematic with stairs. This is the extension of the metaphor, and the images she provides are meant to represent bumps along the road of life.

Well, son, I'll tell you:

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

It's had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

However, while she has faced these hardships, she reminds her son that she has still made progress up that staircase. It has been hard, but she has still be able to move forward.

I'se been a-climbin' on,

And reachin' landin's,

And turnin' corners...

So she encourages her son, through these images that relate to a staircase but are meant to symbolize the journey of life, not to sit down and give up, but to keep going, just as she still is, on the stairway of life.