Mother to Son Quiz

In the first seven lines, to what is Hughes comparing a stairway with "tacks in it and splinters?"

• The son

• Life

• The other people who live in the run-down housing

• The carpet on the stairway

In the poem, boards with "tacks and splinters" and "boards torn up" are symbols for -

• The lack of compassion each man has for his fellow man

• The ungrateful way the mother's son treats her

• Run-Down housing

• A life that has had many difficulties and challenges

What might "reachin' landin's" symbolize in the mother's climb?

• Portions of her life that held magic for her.

• Compassionate forces in her life

• Places in her life where she has to stop and make decisions.

• Destructive forces in her life.

Why do you think that the word "bare" is on a line all alone?

• To highlight the son's brutality

• Because Hughes couldn't think of anything else to add to the line

• Because it rhymes with the word "stair"

• To emphasize how difficult and "bare" of luxuries the mother's life has been

When the speaker talks about "turnin' corners" in the poem, you can infer that she is talking about-

• Places in her life where she set new goals or had to try to solve her problems in a new way

• Places in her life where she felt she had failed

• The point in her life when she was feeling lost and needed her son to be successful

• Her need to find a father figure for her son to look up to.

The crystal stair is a metaphor that is used throughout the poem. Why do you think Hughes makes the stairway "crystal"?

• Crystal sparkles in the sunlight

• Crystal has different colors in it depending on how the light hits it

• You can almost see through crystal

• Crystal is beautiful, but it is also fragile and breaks easily

Why is a "stairway" a particularly appropriate metaphor to describe the wisdom the mother is trying to impart on her son?

• A stairway takes steady persistence to climb and it can go up and down

• Stairways are almost always dirty and rough

• One has to clean and wax a stairway to make it look good

• Stairways are often found in expensive houses

The repetition in lines 4-6 is used to highlight --?

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor

• The son's childhood

• The mother's struggles in her life

• The tools needed to remodel the stairs

• The mother and son's memories of a past life

Based on the speaker's statements in "Mother to Son," why do you think the mother decided to have this talk with her son?

• The mother needed to complain about her life.

• The mother wants to resolve an argument they had.

• The son wants to give up or is struggling with something.

• The mother is reuniting with her son and needed to tell him about her life.