Perhaps Bush and Mitchell are closest to the
mark in their talk of slave heritage. Not that
Toomer is celebrating slavery, but he does talk
elsewhere of the importance of the African
American heritage that he found in the South,
and he strongly regrets the passing away of the
folksinging heritage, the spirituals and the ‘‘folk-
spirit,’’ as he calls it in an autobiographical
sketch quoted in Turner’s introduction toCane.
In that sketch, he seems to be resigned to the
disappearance of that folk-spirit and its replace-
ment by the modern technology of the day, ‘‘vic-
trolas and player-pianos.’’ In ‘‘Storm Ending,’’
however, he may be more issuing a warning
against abandonment of African American her-
itage, or he may be resigned there, too; the poem
is somewhat ambiguous.
What is less ambiguous is the overall sym-
bolic meaning of the poem. It is not just a poem
about nature. It is certainly not a poem about the
tranquillity that the sun brings at the end of a
storm. If anything, the end of the poem is unset-
tling, with the thunder still sounding and the
earth flying from it. At the same time it surely
is not a poem about a multiplicity of symbols,
from the Christian resurrection to the heritage of
slavery to the ugliness of cities. The poem can be
followed in a fairly straightforward, limited way
on both its surface and its symbolic levels. On the
surface, this is first a celebration of the beauty
and power of the storm, followed by a conflict
between sun and storm in which the sun is the
attacker, initiating the end of the storm, though
also helping to produce honey that sweetens the
earth; yet the sweetened earth flees.
Symbolically, the poem portrays the beauty
and power of African Americans, who, however,
are suffering at the hands of white society,
though this white society, by interacting with
the African Americans it is ‘‘biting,’’ helps pro-
duce something sweet or positive. And yet the
earth, standing perhaps for people generally,
flees from this positive interaction, particularly
from the African American side of the interac-
tion, from the power and beauty of African
Americans, and more particularly from the
African American heritage of folk songs and
spirituals. The thunder, the beautiful, powerful
thunder, represents African Americans, espe-
cially the old, traditional ways of African Amer-
icans; it is those ways that Toomer generally
laments the passing of, within and outside of
Cane. ‘‘Storm Ending’’ thus reflects one of the
major thematic concerns ofCane, the loss of the
African American heritage, and it does so in a
symbolic way, and in a mythic, almost archety-
pal way, by emphasizing the power of the
thunderclouds.
This is a poem in the end that celebrates the
dark powers of storms, that reminds readers that
they need to draw on such powers and not flee
them, or they will risk suffering the fate of the
dislocated African Americans of part 2 ofCane
and of everyone who in Jungian terms neglects
their ‘‘shadow side.’’ In the literary criticism
inspired by the psychological theories of Carl
Jung, the shadow represents the passions or
instincts, the powerful part of the unconscious
mind, which needs to be incorporated into con-
sciousness. In ‘‘Storm Ending,’’ Toomer seems to
be representing this shadow side of the national
consciousness, the repressed African American
side that needs to be interacted with rather than
fled from or rejected.
The irony of Jean Toomer’s life is that, after
Cane, he rejected not only the old African Amer-
ican heritage of the South but also the very
notion that he himself was African American.
To writeCane, Toomer states in the letter quoted
by Turner in his introduction, he had to draw on
‘‘a deep part of my nature, a part that I had
repressed,’’ the African American part of his
nature. AfterCane, he repressed that part again
and never published another book of inspired
verse.
Source:Sheldon Goldfarb, Critical Essay on ‘‘Storm
Ending,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning,
2010.Robert Jones
In the following excerpt, Jones examines spiritual
and religious imagery in Toomer’s poems, includ-
ing ‘‘Storm Ending.’’I
Jean Toomer’s popularity as a writer derives
almost exclusively from his lyrical narrative
Cane. He shows himself there to be a poet, but
few are aware of the extensive and impressive
corpus of his other poems. His poetic canon
may be classified into three categories: the
individually published poems, the poems first
published inCane,andthemassofover100
unpublished poems. To date, however, there has
been no attempt to assemble a standard edition
of Toomer’s poetical works, nor has there beenStorm Ending