Storm Ending
‘‘Storm Ending’’ is a short poem by Jean Toomer
that first appeared in the literary magazineDouble
Dealerin September 1922. The next year Toomer
included it inCane, a critically acclaimed collec-
tion of poetry and prose about the lives of African
Americans in the rural South and in Washington,
D.C. Although on the surface ‘‘Storm Ending’’
seems just an evocation of a nature scene, depict-
ing the end of a rainstorm and the emergence of
the sun, because of its placement inCane,com-
mentators sometimes attempt to connect it to
African American themes. The poem has also
been described as belonging to the modernist
school of imagism and being a collection of not
altogether coherent images. One pair of critics
have described it as being ‘‘cubist,’’ a reference to
the experimental artistic movement of the early
twentieth century usually associated with painters
such as Pablo Picasso, in which objects are pre-
sented in fragmented form.
Although some of the poems inCane,espe-
cially in the first part of the book, are written in
conventional forms and have been described as
lyrical or songlike, ‘‘Storm Ending,’’ like the other
poems in Part Two ofCane, is more experimental,
being written in unrhymed free verse. Besides
appearing in the various editions ofCanethat
have appeared since 1923, ‘‘Storm Ending’’ was
also published in the 1988 edition ofThe Collected
Poems of Jean Toomer, edited by Robert B. Jones
and Margery Toomer Latimer.274
JEAN TOOMER
1922