intervention. The ‘‘knowledge of hunger’’ he fears
is the failure of consciousness and of the creative
impulse. Thus, he is reluctant to call other reapers
for fear they will share their truly inspiring grains,
grains he is unable to assimilate. ‘‘It would be
good to hear their songs... reapers of the sweet-
stalk’d/cane, cutters of the corn... even though
their throats/cracked and the strangeness of their
voices deafened me.’’ Still, he beats his soft, sen-
sitive palms against the stubble of the fields of
labor, and his pain is sweeter and more rewarding
than the harvest itself. He is then comforted by
the pains of his struggles, although they will not
bring him knowledge of his hunger.
A major unpublished poem that is also a
product of this period is the mystical and evoca-
tive ‘‘Tell Me,’’ which contains nature imagery
evocative of the local-color poems in Cane,
although it was inspired by the majestic moun-
tains and the scenic Shenandoah River near
Harpers Ferry. Written in three four-line stanzas
of rhymed iambic pentameter, this poem unfolds
with a series of apostrophes to the ‘‘dear beauty
of the dusk,’’ as the poet implores the spirit of
nature to share with him its dark and mysterious
essence....
Source:Robert Jones, ‘‘Jean Toomer as Poet: A Phenom-
enology of the Spirit,’’ inBlack American Literature
Forum, Vol. 21, No. 3, Autumn, 1987, pp. 253–73.
Ann Marie Bush
In the following excerpt, Bush and co-author
Mitchell analyze Toomer’s poems ‘‘Nullo’’ and
‘‘Storm Ending,’’ aligning them with the cubism
movement in art.
Cubists perceive reality through intuitive
vision of the mind rather than through reasoned
logic of the senses. And cubists understand the
reality of an object as the conceptual totality and
essence of that object. They portray conceptual
reality with techniques of form that manifest
cubist concepts of time, space, and motion inter-
twined with four aesthetic concerns: dissociation
of the elements of the object, simultaneity, rela-
tionship of the parts to the whole and the whole
to its parts, and integrity of the object. What
distinguishes cubist writers from cubist painters,
sculptors, or composers is simply the particular
medium of the art. While the cubist painter and
sculptor are limited respectively by texture and
color of paint and types of wood, metal, or
stone, the cubist composer is limited by melody,
rhythm, and harmony, and the cubist writer is
limited by words, punctuation, and spacing on
the page.
Having failed to recognize that Jean Toom-
er’s works are essentially cubist in nature, critics
have traditionally interpreted his work from
sociological, psychological, archetypal, impres-
sionist, or imagist points of view. Hopefully
the following discussion of ‘‘Nullo’’ and ‘‘Storm
Ending,’’ poems which offer particularly striking
examples of the literary cubism so prominent
throughoutCane, will permit scholars to begin
viewing Toomer’s work more clearly.
By compressing many images into one
moment in ‘‘Nullo’’ and ‘‘Storm Ending,’’ Toomer
abandons the conventional beginning-and-end
or cause-and-effect scheme in chronological time
and adopts the cubist non-sequential movement
in synchronic time. Further, Toomer dissociates,
or fragments, his subject into many images, each
of which is no more or less important than the
whole and all of which advance and recede and
blend instantaneously and simultaneously. As a
consequence, the reader must respond with an
intuitive perception of one conceptual compound
image, the totality and essence of the subject.
For example, in ‘‘Nullo’’ Toomer flashes the
texture of nature across the mind, and we react
instantaneously with intuitive perception:
A spray of pine-needles,
Dipped in western horizon gold,
Fell onto a path.
Dry moulds of cow-hoofs.
In the forest.
Rabbits knew not of their falling,
Nor did the forest catch aflame.TOOMER CUBISTICALLY SMATTERS THE
MIND WITH THREE FRAGMENTS, YET THERE
EMERGES A COMPLEXITY OF SUPERIMPOSED PLANAR
IMAGES THAT PORTRAY ABUNDANT ACTIVITY IN ONE
MOMENT’S TIME, THE ENDING OF A STORM. ABSENCE
OF SEQUENTIAL NARRATIVE GIVES PROOF THAT WE
ARE NOT TO PERCEIVE THE ABUNDANT ACTIVITY
CHRONOLOGICALLY, BUT SYNCHRONICALLY.’’Storm Ending