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Jennifer ClarvoeProfessor of English Emerita,
Kenyon College |
'That time of year' for Toomer and Shakespeare
The last line of Jean Toomer’s 1923 poem, “November Cotton Flower” (though not technically a sonnet, 14 lines of rhyming iambic pentameter), marvels at “Beauty so sudden for that time of year.” I’d like to argue that with this phrase, as with the form of his poem, Toomer is engaging in a conversation with Shakespeare’s sonnet 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold.”
Toomer, like Shakespeare, draws us into a vivid and particular late autumn scene; in both, the natural imagery provides the occasion for emotion that makes us catch our breath: the flaring up of embers, a flower blooming out of season, a feeling made acute by our awareness of its vanishing. Toomer’s conversation with Shakespeare, while subtle, seems deliberate. I’d like to consider the impact of this allusion, the position of this sonnet in Toomer’s experimental multi-genre work, Cane, and the perhaps under-appreciated role of Toomer’s formalism in relation to his experimentalism, in 1923. Cane is in some ways as experimental as William Carlos Williams’ 1923 multi-genre work, Spring and All; nevertheless, it shares some formal qualities with Robert Frost’s 1923 Pulitzer-prize winning New Hampshire. But his work undermines any easy reflexive division of work into experimental or formal. Some critics read Toomer’s modernist experiments as inflected by his (complex) racial positioning; there is room to explore these inflections in his more formal work as well. Critics have not yet read “Reapers” (the 8-line rhyming pentameter poem that precedes “November Cotton Flower” in Cane) as engaging an 8-line stanza from Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” re-writing the “black” fate foretold by Marvell’s reapers as one for the actual black reapers in the American South. We need a fuller appreciation of Toomer’s use of these traditional forms.
Toomer, like Shakespeare, draws us into a vivid and particular late autumn scene; in both, the natural imagery provides the occasion for emotion that makes us catch our breath: the flaring up of embers, a flower blooming out of season, a feeling made acute by our awareness of its vanishing. Toomer’s conversation with Shakespeare, while subtle, seems deliberate. I’d like to consider the impact of this allusion, the position of this sonnet in Toomer’s experimental multi-genre work, Cane, and the perhaps under-appreciated role of Toomer’s formalism in relation to his experimentalism, in 1923. Cane is in some ways as experimental as William Carlos Williams’ 1923 multi-genre work, Spring and All; nevertheless, it shares some formal qualities with Robert Frost’s 1923 Pulitzer-prize winning New Hampshire. But his work undermines any easy reflexive division of work into experimental or formal. Some critics read Toomer’s modernist experiments as inflected by his (complex) racial positioning; there is room to explore these inflections in his more formal work as well. Critics have not yet read “Reapers” (the 8-line rhyming pentameter poem that precedes “November Cotton Flower” in Cane) as engaging an 8-line stanza from Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” re-writing the “black” fate foretold by Marvell’s reapers as one for the actual black reapers in the American South. We need a fuller appreciation of Toomer’s use of these traditional forms.
Jennifer Clarvoe is the author of Invisible Tender and Counter-Amores. She is the recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Rome Prize, and a James Merrill House residency. Recent work appears in Literary Matters. Retired from Kenyon College, she lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.