closing line of the poem as revealing that, as
Ford puts it, there is a hierarchy of violence,
with the sun victimizing the thunder and the
thunder victimizing the earth, so that it is quite
understandable that the earth seeks to fly from
the thunder even if it is impossible to do so—
rather than seeing the poem this way, it may be
more helpful to suggest that the earth is simply
not justified in fleeing from the thunder. The
thunder does not actually victimize the earth;
the earth has no need to flee; on the contrary,
the thunder is the source of energy in this poem,
and the earth should not turn its back on it.
Ford and other critics such as Nellie McKay
see ‘‘Storm Ending’’ as a symbolic poem about
African Americans. The key line supporting this
reading is the one that refers to full lips, full
lips being a stereotypical characteristic of Afri-
can Americans. Also, as Ford notes, elsewhere
inCane, full lips are associated with positive
images of joyfully singing African Americans, a
tradition that African Americans developed in
the South and that northern blacks mistakenly
abandoned in favor of modernity.
In the poem, the full lips are associated with
flowers, but probably not real flowers. The poem
begins by comparing the thunder to flowers, and
the only reading that really makes sense of the
poem sees the metaphorical comparison as con-
tinuing throughout. That is, these are not real
flowers; these are thunderclouds that look like
flowers, thunderclouds that look beautiful and
can produce great rumbling sounds that strike
the ears of the people below. These are clouds
that are alive like flowers and powerful like huge
bells. They are also full-lipped, making one think
of African Americans. Being thunderclouds,
they would also be dark, which might further
support the notion that they symbolize black
people.
Then the sun bites them, ending the storm
that they have produced, or at least initiating the
end of the storm, for the storm seems still to be
happening even until the very last word of the
poem, which is ‘‘thunder,’’ and the rain continues
to fall, even if it is only dripping. In fact, rain is
not mentioned until the sun bites the clouds, so
one might even see the sun as important in pro-
ducing the rain. Now, this rain is bloody but also
resembles golden honey; there is something pos-
itive in it, thus something positive that could be
said to come from the sun, even though in this
poem, in contrast to conventional notions, the
sun seems villainous.
It may be useful to pause at this portrayal of
the sun and to ask, if the dark thunderclouds
represent black society, what does the sun repre-
sent? To ask the question is almost to answer it.
In contrast to the black clouds, the bright sun
that bites them must represent white society.
The symbols thus suggest not just the suffering
of African Americans, as suggested by Ford and
McKay, but their suffering at the hands of white
society.
And yet the sun does seem to join with the
thunder in producing the honeyed rain. Toomer
might thus be suggesting that though the sun,
or white society, causes suffering, it is also
necessary. In a letter he wrote in 1922, quoted
by Darwin Turner in his introduction toCane,
even while saying that the source of his creative
energy lay in ‘‘the Negro group,’’ Toomer
emphasizes that he always ‘‘strived for a spiritual
fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermin-
gling’’—the sort of racial intermingling that
characterized his mixed white and black ances-
try. Toomer said he sought to have the elements
within himself ‘‘live in harmony’’ and ‘‘function
as complements.’’
If the poem is not completely rejecting the
sun, then, it would be wrong of the earth to flee
from it, but still more would it be wrong for the
earth to flee from the thunder, since the thunder
is depicted as so beautiful and full of energy—
energy, it is true, that could be dangerous, for it
does strike at the people below, but again, con-
trary to convention, this poem seems to celebrate
thunder. How odd, then, that the poem ends by
having the earth fly away from the thunder. If
anything, the earth should flee the biting sun,
though even that might be a mistake.
Ford explains the last line by saying that the
thunder, like the sun, is a victimizer, but it is hard
to see evidence in the poem for that. Ann Marie
Bush and Louis D. Mitchell, in their article in
Black American Literature Forum, see the earth
fleeing the thunder as representing both a fleeing
by African Americans from their slave heritage
and a fleeing by white Americans from ‘‘their
Black brothers,’’ but it is hard to see how the
thunder can represent slavery or how the last line
can be representing all these different things at
once. Nellie McKay sees the last line as a flight
from ‘‘urban ugliness,’’ but it is also hard to see
how the thunder can represent that.Storm Ending