Despite the cheerful Van Gogh I've chosen to illustrate this post with, I find Toomer's "Reapers," the poem that directly follows "Karintha" in Cane, to be a very foreboding, frightening poem. While I will be the first to admit that I am no genius when it comes to analyzing poetry, I'll go out on a limb here an say that what connects "Reapers" to "Karintha," aside from its thematic foregrounding of the "fall" (be it a fall from grace or simply the season) and the sense they both create of something drawing to a close, is the concept of containment. Though the strategies may be different, Toomer formally enacts the futile energy that must be expended to restrain energies that will not be subdued.
At first gloss, "Reapers" comes across as a fairly innocuous, picturesque poem; this quality goes far toward explaining why it is so often anthologized, and so often poorly taught (as it was to me, both in grade school and in high school). This is all the more surprising when one considers the number of startling and/or densely allusive images simmering in the lines. The title of the poem itself is a noun with a commonly recognized double meaning--"reaper" can mean a person (or a machine, as in line 5) who harvests crops or, in the proper sense, can be short for the Grim Reaper. Those who harvest the fruits from the seeds of injustice, or revolutionaries, can be said to unite these two meanings in one image. Read under this impression, the poem's content reads as relentless and threatening. The repetition of the sibilant "s" recreates an aural sense of the scythes' blades cutting down stalks of wheat as the "black reapers" sharpen their tools and "start their silent swinging," like an army mowing down its opposition. The "black horses" that drive the mower do not stop when the blades slice through a "startled, squealing" rat. The speaker, sounding prophetic, describes how the "blade,/ Blood-stained, continue[s] cutting weeds and shade" (3). The overall feeling that the poem evokes is one of upcoming, inevitable, unstoppable revolution at the hands of black workers who wish to wipe out current power structures in order to usher in a more socially just world.
Close attention to the words, images and sounds of the poem makes it hard to miss its aura of looming threat, so why do people so often miss it? My guess is that the poem's strategies of containment--meant, as I understand them, to formally enact that energy required to restrain the energies that fuel the content--work too well. The poem could not be more conventionally composed: 8 lines arranged in heroic couplets arranged AABBCCDD. All lines, save one, strictly follow iambic pentameter and all couplets, save one, are end-stopped. The second line--the one in which the sharpening of scythes is completed and the hones are about to be placed in pockets--is the only second line of a couplet in which the content spills over, enjambs, into the next line; it is also the only one that, depending on how you pronounce the word "sharpening," expands to eleven syllables instead of confining itself to the pentameter. After that line, however, all couplets end-stop, and no lines are enjambed. It's almost as though the form let the content get out of hand and then had to restrain it; a brief examination of the rhyme scheme reinforces this impression. As noted above, the rhyme scheme appears to follow the most traditional of heroic couplet progressions, AABBCCDD. Yet the A rhymes, "stones" and "hones," could easily be considered slant rhymed with the B rhymes, "done" and "one"--especially given the inflections given to these words by certain regional accents (a rural Georgian accent comes to mind). The same goes for the C rhymes, "weeds" and "bleeds," with the D rhymes, "blade" and "shade." Such dense rhymes at the end of the lines, like corks in so many stoppers, conveys an intense repression, one that, while it is successful in keeping the revolutionary energy in the poem conveyed for now, seems destined to fail.
It's worth considering, as we continue with this analysis of Cane, whether more could be made of the regional accents on the slant rhymes discussed above. I'd also like to look into how "Reapers," as a joint with "Karintha," moves the text along--what does the joint articulate?
Transitioning into "November Cotton Flower," then, we might extend this consideration of joints and articulation to this poem, its connection and decalage with "Reapers" and "Karintha," as well as the haunting "Becky," which immediately follows it.
I wish I had more to say about "November Cotton Flower," whose title both recalls the preacher's description of Karintha's presumed innocence (thereby inviting us to abstract the titular image and not take it too literally) and suggests an image from a much later novel, the iconic geranium that Ruthie finds during the flood that closes Grapes of Wrath (1939). Like "Reapers," "November Cotton Flower" is composed of heroic couplets, with a mostly regular rhyme scheme of AABBCCDD EEFFGG (FF displays some variation, which I will expand on below). In all but its rhyme scheme, however, the poem reads like a Shakespearian sonnet--three quatrains developing a certain tone and theme, followed by a couplet that undercuts or reverses them. As in the pieces that precede it, the tone of this poem is initially autumnal, with the first eight lines describing a late fall/early winter scene of intense barrenness and drought. No warmth can find its way into the strange desert of this scene, which is described in such terms as "cold," "rusty," "old," "vanishing," "pinched," "slow," and "dead." Even the area's birds, those erstwhile symbols of hope, cannot survive; seeking water, they perish "[i]n wells a hundred feet below the ground" (line 8). If "Karintha" and "Reapers" gestured toward a way of life that, disappearing, slips through the narrator's/speaker's fingers even as he struggles to capture it, this poem appears to indicate that life itself, as opposed to a way of living it, is being sucked away by the greedy, thirsty soil.
Then, suddenly, in the ninth line of the poem, that old greedy soil (which, in later pieces, will be used almost as a homonym for "soul") yields its bounty: a "flower" with the power to startle, new life that promptly "assumed/ Significance" in the eyes of the "Old folks." The folk wisdom that often goes under the heading of "Superstition" reads the flower as "Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear/ Beauty so sudden for that time of year" (lines 13-14). Flowers have long served as symbols of hope, particularly those that spring out of the desert or out of lifelessness; superstition, holding its breath, would not be remiss in personifying it (lines 11 and 12 are the only lines not written in perfect pentameter, coming in at nine-bated-breath-syllables apiece; they are also the only lines in which the rhyme [saw/before] appears to be slant, unless [as in "Reapers"] read aloud with a regional accent). In the case of this flower, the reader, too, has, via the whiff of Karintha carried over via the poem's title, been invited to participate in the purported superstition and "read" the flower in this way, too. However, as "Karintha, carrying beauty" taught us in the sketch devoted to her, that which we take to signify "beauty" usually fails, when examined directly and frankly, to live up to the task. The cotton flower, the fruit of so much lost life and struggle, is at the very best an ambiguous symbol. As is Georgia cotton itself, steeped in so much hate-fueled blood.
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