Poetry Reflecting Cultural Progress A Comparative...

Comparing Poets The literature of an era defines the culture that exists during that period of time. For poets, they take upon themselves the responsibility of showing the culture of their eras through shorter, more rhythmic pieces. In the cases of authors Langston Hughes and John Lennon, each embodies the culture in which he was writing. The poems Mother to Son and Eleanor Rigby both share certain poetic elements which serve to reflect their cultures and to establish a narrative between the poet and his readership, or in the case of John Lennon, his listeners as Eleanor Rigby was recorded as a song and heard by music lovers around the world before it was recognized as a piece of brilliant lyric poetry. Although the two men wrote from four decades apart, each one took the basic components of poetry and poetic conceits to create works which would reflect and progress their cultures. Hughes poem Mother to Son uses the rhythmic patterns of poetry to convey a lesson that is from a mother to her child, but it is also symbolic of a message that is related from an experienced individual and then passed down to someone who is potentially more naè ª °ve about the ways of the world. In the poem, the narrator speaks from the point of view of a mother talking to her son about the life that she has led. Life has not been easy for her and she has had to struggle throughout her life to acquire the simple lot that she possesses. She uses the imagery of a crystal staircase to