Entry #8

   When I read Mother To Son for the first time, I thought that it was a very confusing poem. And i wasn't really sure what the meaning of it was. But then I read it a few more times and it became less confusing, I thought that the "voice" or mother in the poem was just talking about life in general, but when we had a class discussion about the poem, and I realized that the mother was talking about-yes-life, but she was mostly talking about her life. And how the son should know that once you try and try to get to this "crystal stair" there isn't always one. But if you work your whole life to get to a better place, then eventually you will get to a "landing" in the stairs where you can say that you reached one place, and now you can go to the next level. When i read this poem again, and again, AND AGAIN, I began to learn about how the time period that the poem was written in, really affected the way that the poem was written, and it said a lot about who the poem was supposed to be about. 


   I think that the fact that I knew when the poem was written helped me to understand the poem better, and understand why it was about what it was about. When my class had to annotate it, and write about what the poem meant to us, and what we thought it meant. I wrote that I thought that the mother was talking directly to her son, and that when she was talking to him she was saying the her life was really hard, and that when she was going up these "stairs" that it never really got better. But now I think that she was talking to more then just her son. I think that she was talking to a broader audience. I think that she was talking to a lot of people; and one of them was her son.