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What poetic devices are used in The Negro Mother?
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"The Negro Mother" by Langston Hughes uses various poetic devices, including metaphor, simile, apostrophe, and repetition. Metaphors compare the speaker's difficult past to dark paths and valleys, while similes like "dark as the night" and "shining like the sun" highlight paradoxes. Apostrophe is used as the mother addresses children symbolically. Repetition, especially of "remember," underscores the importance of history and memory for overcoming oppression.
The speaker uses a metaphor when she describes “the long dark way / That [she] had to climb . . .” She has not literally physically climbed a darkened path, but she has figuratively done so, and she compares her difficult life to a such a path.
She uses several similes: she says that her face is “dark as the night,” and yet it is “shining like the sun with love’s true light”; a simile compares two unalike things using the word like or as. This is also a paradox: how can her face be both dark and shining? Her skin is dark, but the love within her soul seems to shine through her skin.
Soon, the speaker herself becomes symbolic of the infant abducted from Africa; of the child who crossed the sea; of the slave woman who worked the field; of the slave who was beaten,...
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sold, and separated from her family; and so on: the speaker is a symbol of all these other persons of color who have suffered and longed for the chance to be free.
She uses another simile when she says that “God put a dream like steel in [her] soul”: this dream was strong, as steel is strong, and God kept it alive so that she would never lose hope, so that all enslaved peoples would retain it.
More metaphors compare her oppressed past to “the night” and a “valley [that] was filled with tears.” This valley could also be an allusion to the Valley of the Shadow of Death from the Bible. Another metaphor compares her past to a “road [that] was hot with the sun,” and in another metaphor, she says that she “was the seed of the coming Free.” She asks the new generations of black Americans to “make of [her] years a torch for tomorrow,” to “Make of [her] pass a road to the light,” and to “Lift high [her] banner out of the dust”: further metaphors.
In his poem "The Negro Mother," Langston Hughes employs several different poetic devices. Here are three examples:
Apostrophe: an apostrophe is a figure of speech with which the speaker of the poem addresses someone who is absent or an abstract concept. In the case of "The Negro Mother," the way the mother addresses the children is an example of apostrophe. These children can be understood as an abstraction, representing black children or black people in a general sense.
Simile: a simile is a comparison between two things and uses the word "like" or "as." In this poem, similes such as "shining like the sun," "a dream like steel," and "stand like free men" all emphasize the message of hope that this poem attempts to convey.
Repetition: the word "remember" is repeated several times in the poem as a command to the children to whom the poem is addressed. The repetition of this verb communicates to the reader the importance of history and memory to the poet; according to the speaker of the poem, children need to remember the pain and suffering of their ancestors in order to rise above and overcome the oppression that afflicts black people.
Langston Hughes, in his poem The Negro Mother, uses a few different poetic devices.
Simile:
A simile is a comparison made between two typically different things using the word "like" or "as" to make the comparison.
A simile is found in both lines five and six:
Look at my face -- dark as the night --
Yet shining like the sun
The first comparison made is between the speaker's face and the dark night. The second comparison is made, again, to the speaker's face, but this time it is compared to the sun.
Paradox:
These two comparisons combine to create a paradox. A paradox is a statement that is made which seems contradictory to itself. Here, the paradox is that the speaker's face can be both dark as night and shining as the sun.
One last poetic device used in the poem is alliteration. Alliteration is the
repetition of a consonant sound within a line of poetry. Therefore, the
repetition of the "c" in line ten is defined as alliteration.
Bringing the cotton and the corn to yield.