Poetry for Students, Volume 31

comes a time to stop fleeing from what might
actually be something positive. Or the message
may be less judgmental and more an observation
of the tendency to seek escape. The bee wants to
get away in ‘‘Beehive,’’ and the earth wants to
escape, indeed does escape, in ‘‘Storm Ending.’’
This may simply be what happens, according
to Toomer, and perhaps nothing can be done
about it.

The Struggles of African Americans
Beneath the surface imagery of storms and sun-
shine and honey, this poem is often seen as
presenting a symbolic picture of the difficult sit-
uation of African Americans. If the storm clouds
represent black people, one message of the poem
would be that though they are beautiful in their
very storminess, they also suffer at the hands of
the sun, most likely representing white society,
and bleed from being attacked. Adding insult to
this injury, they are then fled from by the earth,
which may represent society at large.

STYLE

Imagery, Imagism, Cubism
‘‘Storm Ending’’ contains what may seem a riot
of images, too many for at least one critic, Karen
Jackson Ford, who in her bookSplit-Gut Song:
Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernitysees
incoherence as a result. There are images of flow-
ers, bells, full-lipped petals being bitten and
bleeding, and honey dripping. The profusion of
images has led some critics, such as Robert B.
Jones in his introduction toThe Collected Poems
of Jean Toomer, to call ‘‘Storm Ending’’ an exam-
ple of imagism. Imagism was a school of poetry
associated with Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell
around the time of World War I. Imagist poetry
aimed to present concise depictions of natural
objects in free verse. The profusion of images
has also led at least one pair of critics, Ann
Marie Bush and Louis D. Mitchell, in their article
on Toomer inBlack American Literature Forum,
to describe the poem as an example of cubism.
Cubism was an artistic movement around the
same time as imagism, usually associated with
painting rather than poetry. Cubist works tended
to present fragmented images of objects from
varying perspectives.

Metaphor and Simile

Metaphors and similes are types of figurative

language in which a literal object is compared to

something else. ‘‘Storm Ending’’ is basically a

description of thunder or thunderclouds in figu-

rative language. Thunder is compared to blos-

soms, bells, and flowers with full lips, as if faces.

To be more precise, thunder is described as blos-

soming and thus compared to flowers, and the

flowers are then compared to bells and faces,

so the poem could be said to contain metaphors

within metaphors, or in the case of the bell image,

a simile within a metaphor. A simile uses the

words ‘‘like’’ or ‘‘as,’’ making an overt comparison,

as is done in the poem for the bell comparison,

whereas a metaphor simply states or implies that

somethingissomething else, as the poem does by

describing the thunder as blossoming.

Personification

Personification is the attribution of human char-

acteristics to inanimate objects. The description

of the flowers in the poem having full lips is thus

not only a metaphor but a personification, mak-

ing the flowers or the flowerlike thunderclouds

seem like a person with full lips. Similarly, the

description of the sun biting the flowers makes

the sun seem like a violent person or animal.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is the perception or description of

something discernible by one sense in terms of

another sense. Perceiving or describing a sound

as being a certain color would be an example. In

‘‘Storm Ending’’ thunder,a sound, is described as

blossoming, that is, having the shape of a flower,

which is an example of synesthesia (if one takes the

speaker to mean thunder and not thunderclouds).

Symbolism

A symbol is a word or phrase that while meaning

something on a literal level also evokes a whole

other level of meaning. ‘‘Storm Ending’’ has often

been seen as working on a symbolic level, being

not only a description of a storm but also a depic-

tion of the situation of African Americans. Thus

the thunder is not just thunder and the sun is not

just the sun; nor is their conflict just a depiction of

warring nature, but rather it is a depiction of the

charged relationship between black and white in

Toomer’s time.

Storm Ending