of Gurdjieffian philosophical concepts, and he
found publishers for very few of them.
In 1931, Toomer married the writer Margery
Latimer, who died giving birth to their daughter
the next year. In 1934 he married Marjorie Con-
tent, a well-off daughter of a Wall Street broker.
He became a Quaker in later years while still
remaining an adherent of Gurdjieff, and he
wrote on religious and spiritual topics. His last
years were marked by ill health, and he died in a
nursing home in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, on
March 30, 1967.
POEM SUMMARYTitle
The title ‘‘Storm Ending’’ serves as a reminder that
the focus of this poem is on how a storm ends.
Although it contains some description of the
storm before it ends, the heart of the poem is the
emergence of the sun, causing the storm to lift and
the rain to merely drip. On the other hand, the
storm is just ending; it is not over, and even at the
end of the poem there is thunder from which
the earth flees.
Ann Marie Bush and Louis D. Mitchell, in
their article on Toomer inBlack American Liter-
ature Forum, suggest that ‘‘Storm Ending’’ can
be divided into three ‘‘fragments’’ based on the
poem’s images. The first fragment or segment
contains the opening four lines describing the
thunder, the second contains the next four lines,
and the last consists of only the final line.
Segment 1
In the first of the opening four lines the thunder
appears above the heads of the people below
and takes the form of beautiful blossoms. What
is meant may be either that the thunderclouds
look like blossoms or that the bursting outward
of the sound of the thunder is like the sudden
blossoming of a flower.
In the second line, flowers are described as
being like bells. Some scholars see these as actual
flowers on the ground below the thunderclouds.
Others say the poem is continuing to describe the
thunderclouds themselves as flowers. The poet
may also be continuing a complex synesthetic
metaphor describing the sound of the thunder
with the visual images of flowers.
The third line refers to the wind and describes
a rumbling sound, such as thunder would make,
making it seem like the description is indeed
about thunderclouds that look like flowers or
thunder whose sound is like flowers rather than
about actual flowers.
The first segment ends with a description of
sight and sound, continuing the image of a bell by
describing clappers reaching out to strike the ears
of the people below. In other words, as Karen
Jackson Ford suggests in her Toomer studySplit-
Gut Song, the thunder, or the lightning accompa-
nying it, is striking from one cloud to another.
There is thus the sight of the lightning and the
sound that the thunderclaps make when they
strike. Ford also suggests that the reason why
Toomer creates the double comparison of thun-
derclouds to both bells and flowers is that while
the bell image alone would suffice to indicate the
noise of the thunder, the flower image is needed
because flowers are alive. The suggestion, then, is
that there is something alive about the thunder.
The punctuation at the end of the first frag-
ment of the poem is somewhat odd. Instead of a
period or the three dots of an ellipsis, Toomer
puts in two dots. Bush and Mitchell say this is
meant to indicate only a slight pause, intermedi-
ate between that of a period and that of an ellipsis.Segment 2
The second segment begins with another descrip-
tion of flowers. Again, there is the question of
whether these are real flowers on the ground or
still the thunderclouds or thunder. As the follow-
ing lines unfold, it seems to make more sense to
see these flowers as a metaphorical description
of the clouds rather than as actual flowers.
The cloud-flowers at the beginning of this
segment, then, are described as having full lips.
Ford notes that full lips are both a stereotypical
characteristic of African Americans and also,
elsewhere inCane, are associated with singing
and the connection of southern blacks with their
African roots. This would thus be the moment in
the poem that most connects it with the African
American themes elsewhere inCane.
The second line of this segment contains a
singular description of the sun biting the flowers.
Ford says this makes the sun seem destructive,
which is not the conventional way of viewing the
sun’s emergence at the end of a storm. If the
flowers here are still the thunderclouds, the sun
is in effect attacking the thunder, taking an activeStorm Ending