question was:"How does "Cane" make use of the blues, jazz, spirituals, or other forms of African American Music? Can you detect any parallels with James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"?

Reaction Paper - Jean Toomer, Cane

        One not wholly reads Toomer, one hears him; his words live beyond the page, full of rhythm, atomic reactor and sound. In the introduction it is said, Toomer spent his later years question why the reading public of his day failed to see that Cane was a song of an end, a song that had helped Toomer to put the racial misgiving within himself to rest.(Toomer 1168) Much of his writing seems to perhaps been hummed or muttered chthonian the breath, much like lyrics of a popular song exerting their influence. It is at times dark, and light, set down spirited, even jovial, but never meaningless.

        In Toomers first story Karintha, the opening stanza;

                 Her skin is like twilight on the eastern horizon,

                 O cant you see it, O cant you see it,

                 Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon

                 . . . When the sun goes down.(Toomer 1170)

The story is presented in a appoint and response fashion much like a ghostlike form. The Stanza is repeated again at the end of the story. Toomer uses both the lay structure in Karintha and segments of poetry and prose that are blues like.

         7th Street poetry begins and is reaching out to be interpret in the form of blues. This gospel like song, which is repeated at the end of the poem, is a song that shows the corruption of the black world in this fast paced city and has a tone of mawkishness yearning for a transformation of the soul for these people. The body of the poem is Toomers blunt views on Seventh Street in free verse. The imagery is very intense and the rhythms and phrasings are very tuneful much like the story Theater. The rhythms that...

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