Mother To Son Comparison Essay

Mothers and Fathers around the world have tried to give advice to their sons since the beginning of time. Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son” and Peter Meinke’s “Advice to Son” have many things that are common with each other; nevertheless, there are drastic differences when they are written. The time periods that these poems are written have grand influence in the poem's message.
“Mother to Son” was written by Langston Hughes in the middle the nineteen twenties. In the United States, we have a large contrast of wealth between the super wealthy like the Carnegies and the Rockefellers. Then you had tenement buildings and very crowded and poorer cities with millions of people not having basic facilities like toilets. In the poem “Mother to Son” the mother says “life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”. She has not enjoyed the nation's wealth doubling in the 1920’s; all she sees are “broken boards that are torn up.” This is one reason that we see the great Depression come after 1929 because all of the wealth has been distributed unequally. Furthermore,
The son symbolizes the reader. In (line1/2) “ the trick is, to live your days as if each one may be your last” All of the dangers that he will be facing from the constituent threat of being decimated of this plant by the Soviet Union or being sent to the Vietnam war or Korean war. The author comment on his opening line as if it signifies how the young have lost their lives by being shot at or blown apart in ways that people cannot even fathom. In the Poem the Advice to the son she talk about all of luxury that can be his if there no war he can “ marry pretty girl” have bread and wine only if “work with another”(line 20/21) both of them signifies what would happen if they only made peace with the Russians. They both could prosper. The experience of these parent had in their live changed they way the spoke to their