19 pages • 38 minutes read
Jean ToomerStorm Ending
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Storm Ending” is a free-verse poem with nine lines of varying lengths. It can be classified as a pastoral poem (a poem celebrating retreating into an idyllic natural setting). Lucinda H. MacKethan’s article “Jean Toomer’s Cane: A Pastoral Problem” argues that Cane’s “pastoral design [...] provides a certain measure of stability for the complex and often contradictory urges reflected in Toomer’s work as he confronts the world that he, as both black man and modern man, must negotiate” (Cane. 1988. Norton Critical Edition). The pastoral form of poetry, which dates to ancient Greece and was popular in the English Renaissance, is re-envisioned by Toomer’s 20th-century verse.
Additionally, “Storm Ending” has qualities from the Imagist literary movement. Imagism was founded a few years before Toomer began working on Cane. Ezra Pound, inspired by classic Chinese poets such as Li Bai, published his aesthetic vision for this form in 1913. Pound described Imagism as focusing on presenting an image in conversational diction rather than with a strict meter or formal language. Turner’s introduction to Cane notes that Toomer’s “poetry and prose depend on the clean, impressionist phrasings of the Imagists” (Cane). This connects the literary movement of Imagism with the artistic movement of impressionism that included Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet.
Finally, “Storm Ending” is part of the book Cane, which can be classified as a prosimetrum. This is an “extended work of prose into which [...] the author inserts poems or passages of verse” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics). As mentioned earlier, Toomer’s contemporary Hughes also worked in this form. The prosimetrum form is also picked up by later generations of Black authors, such as Audre Lorde in her automythography, Zami.
Repetition
Toomer uses repetition throughout “Storm Ending” to emphasize symbolic and natural elements. The word “thunder” begins and ends the poem (Lines 1, 9). This repetition brings the poem full circle, which speaks to the theme of nature’s cyclical power. Toomer also repeats the metaphor for thunderclouds, “flowers” in Lines 2 and 5. The number of repetitions of “flowers” matching the number of repetitions of “thunder” balances the symbolic metaphor with what it is representing—both have weight in the poem. The repetition of flowers also occurs in two different parts of the poem’s cycle: at the beginning when the thunderclouds are still “[g]reat” (Line 2), and when the “sun” (Line 6) starts to peek through the clouds.
When the poem transitions to the sun taking power, the repetition turns to “rain” (Lines 7, 8). This is repeated in Lines 7 and 8, the closest of the repetitions. Both instances of “rain” are only preceded by gerunds “Bleeding” (Line 7) and “Dripping” (Line 8) in their respective lines. Both these gerunds contain two syllables and are eight letters long. These similarities create more ways for the instances of “rain” to mirror each other across their lines.
Conceit
The poem’s central floral metaphor is a conceit. Poetic conceits are extended metaphors that often become elaborate, sprawling, counterintuitive, and highly particular, containing many different interwoven concepts and signifiers. While shapes of clouds are often said to resemble a wide variety of flora, fauna, and other objects, Toomer’s comparison between thunderclouds and flowers is extensive, refined, and unique. The poet takes care to develop the metaphor by including several different floral descriptions, and the imagery and diction spill over into connections with honey, bees, lips, and bells. Each of these diverse images finds unity in their immediacy and sensuousness, and they coalesce to embody a distinctly ordered and elemental cosmos.
