such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce and with
experiments in literary form, with breaking
away from traditions and conventions, as for
instance in the development of the sort of free
verse found in ‘‘Storm Ending’’ and in the other
poems in Part Two ofCane.InPartOneofCane,
Toomer included several more conventional
poems, adhering to traditional poetic structures.
Karen Jackson Ford, in her bookSplit-Gut Song,
says this reflects the focus on the past found in
Part One, whereas Part Two focuses on current
dislocations and the decay of African American
traditions, and thus it is natural that the poems in
that section are more modernist, less conven-
tional, and less lyric.
Toomer’s bringing together of African
American themes and modernism is often seen
as innovative. While previous African American
writers had used conventional forms in depicting
aspects of African American life, Toomer, who
associated with avant-garde white writers in New
York, mixed the latest experiments in literary
technique with themes dealing with the African
American experience. He was the only black
writer of his time to be compared with such lead-
ing modernists as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
CRITICAL OVERVIEWCane, the book in which ‘‘Storm Ending’’
appeared in 1923, was published to good reviews
though small sales. Critics praised it for its depic-
tion of African American life and its lyrical artis-
try. Darwin T. Turner, in his bookIn a Minor
Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their
Search for Identity, quotes a 1925 commentary
by William Stanley Braithwaite, who calledCane
‘‘a book of gold and bronze, of dusk and flame,
of ecstasy and pain.’’ Toomer was hailed as a
promising African American writer, one who
wrote of ‘‘real negroes,’’ in the words of John
Armstrong, as quoted by Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., inFigures in Black: Words, Signs, and the
‘‘Racial’’ Self. Robert T. Kerlin, in a 1926 review
quoted by Gates, says Toomer’s book is full of
‘‘the spirit of poetry’’ and is ‘‘stamped all over
with genius.’’
None of these early commentators mention
‘‘Storm Ending’’ specifically. After its first brief
success,Caneas a whole faded from view until the
revival of black studies in the late 1960s. In 1969
Canewas reprinted for the first time in decades,
and in subsequent years it inspired numerous
academic studies. Few of these, however, discuss
‘‘Storm Ending’’; most focus on the stories and
sketches inCane. A few deal with the poetry, but
mostly with the lyrical poetry of Part One, not the
more modernist works like ‘‘Storm Ending’’ that
appear in Part Two.
The few critics who do comment on ‘‘Storm
Ending’’ seem baffled by it. Even Karen Jackson
Ford, who in her bookSplit-Gut Songprovides
the poem’s most detailed analysis, ends by saying
that it ‘‘isn’t coherent,’’ though she perhaps means
that it is deliberately incoherent to reflect the
incoherence of urban black life at the time.
Other commentators are content just to call it
an impressionistic work, ‘‘exquisite only in the
sharpness and suggestiveness of [its] imagery,’’
as Turner puts it in In a Minor Chord.One
scholar, Robert B. Jones, in his introduction to
The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer,perhaps
simply seeing what he expected to see given
the title, says the poem depicts ‘‘the momentous
return of sunshine and tranquility’’ after a storm.
Bernard Bell, in an article reprinted in Therman
B. O’Daniel’sJean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation,
says the poem depicts human beings’ insensitivity
to nature, but he does not elaborate. Franc ̧oise
Clary, in her article inJean Toomer and the Har-
lem Renaissance, sees an allusion to the crucifix-
ion and the Christian apocalypse in the references
to blood and honey, and Nellie McKay, in her
bookJean Toomer, Artist, sees symbolic repre-
sentation of suffering African Americans in the
poem, along with ‘‘the loss of the positive aspects
of the rural culture and.. .the rise of urban ugli-
ness.’’ How these deeper meanings are worked
out in the poem is not made clear by these com-
mentators, and even on the surface the critics
disagree about whether Toomer is referring to
actual flowers or rather to thunderclouds that
look like flowers.CRITICISMSheldon Goldfarb
Goldfarb is a specialist in Victorian literature who
has published nonfiction books as well as a novel for
young adults set in Victorian times. In this essay, he
explores the symbolism in ‘‘Storm Ending.’’
Conventionally, storms are things of danger,
and the ending of a storm is cause for relief.
Conventionally, too, the sun is a symbol of life,Storm Ending