Storm Ending

“Beehive” by Jean Toomer (1932)

This poem precedes “Storm Ending” in Cane and explore similar natural imagery. Honey appears in Line 8 in “Storm Ending,” as well as Lines 7, 11, and 12 in “Beehive.” The honey in “Beehive” is silver, rather than the golden honey of “Storm Ending,” separating the poems in terms of night and day. This difference in color reflects how “Storm Ending” looks at the “sun” (Line 6) versus how “Beehive” focuses on the “moon” (Lines 3, 4, 5, 13).

Furthermore, both poems include floral imagery; “flowers” appear in Lines 2 and 5 of “Storm Ending,” and “flower” is the final word of “Beehive” (Line 14). This solidifies the connection between pollinators and their plants. Both poems feature the earth and explore the theme of how humans are insignificant in comparison to the power of nature. A human is simply a “drone” (Line 9) and the earth merely a “cell” of the “comb” (Line 8) in “Beehive.”

“Harlem Shadows” by Claude McKay (1922)

Toomer was a very early figure in the Harlem Renaissance. According to Turner’s introduction to Cane, “of the materials now known as the literature of the [Harlem] Renaissance, only one book had been published—Claude McKay’s volume of poetry, Harlem Shadows” before Cane was published. In contrast to Toomer, McKay’s titular poem is one that focuses on the urban “street to street” (Lines 6, 12, 18). McKay also follows a consistent rhymed and metered structure throughout his poem, while Toomer’s lines vary in length and have no end rhymes.

“Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes (1951)

Langston Hughes, another major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote this poem as part of his prose-poetry hybrid work Montage of a Dream Deferred, which was highly influenced by the prose-poetry hybridity of Cane. Toomer briefly attended City College of New York, which features in Hughes’s “Theme for English B.” While both Toomer and Hughes attended college in New York, Hughes was not able to pass as white, and his poetry more explicitly spoke to the experience of living as a Black man in New York.

“Welcome Rain on a Spring Night” by Du Fu, or Tu Fu (eighth century)

While this eighth-century poem comes from an entirely different movement than “Storm Ending,” the thematic concerns, as well as specific metaphorical turns, are almost identical. Both poems feature a storm broken by sun, as well as oddly specific references to the blooming of flowers in the wake of the rainstorm (something relatively rare in non-poetic flowers, outside of the desert, which neither poet lived in). The “red” and “wet” (Line 7) world in the seventh line of “Welcome Rain on a Spring Night” is comparable to the seventh line of “Storm Ending,” which only contains “Bleeding rain” (Line 7).

Toomer was directly influenced by Imagist poetry, which, in turn, was influenced by Ezra Pound’s readings and “translations” of historic Chinese poetry. The two poems, while separated by 1,200 years, both thematically explore states of transition. While Toomer emphasizes the relative smallness of humanity through his imagism, Du Fu (Tu Fu) concludes on a more urban note: “in the brocade city” (Line 8). By turning to the city, rather than the natural sphere, the two poems illuminate contrasting principles of poetic description: Toomer reveals a vast world without humanity, and Du Fu (Tu Fu) reveals an ornate city that was formerly concealed.

“The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance” by Li Bai (Li Po), translated by Ezra Pound (1915)

This is one example of the classical Chinese poems that Pound “translated,” meaning he adapted an existing English translation (Pound did not understand Chinese). Toomer’s poetics are influenced by Pound’s literary movement of Imagism, which partially came from Pound’s love of ancient Chinese verse.