Song Of The Son Poem By Jean Toomer

The poem “Song of the Son” is in the book Cane by Jean Toomer, written in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance. The poem has 23 lines organized into stanzas, with some introducing a rhyme theme and ending lines with the same word. This lyric poem does a great job of explaining and describing the scenery of each image in Toomer’s head. The poem’s speaker is a father making it back home to a family or community in rural Georgia. I believe he is speaking on behalf of the African American community and addressing the African American community, such as being a Black Activist. He does this by reminding the African American community of the struggles and oppression they faced getting to the point they are at and to not forget about it as they

He uses “parting,” which means something/someone is leaving. Now he does not clarify the parting soul (line 1). He is using allusion because his target audience is the African American community. In this instance, he equates the “soul” to slavery that is parting from the African American community (line 1). As they move forward, they should still remember it through song. In Barbara Foley’s “‘In the Land of Cotton’: Economics and Violence in Jean Toomer’s ‘Cane’” she speaks of the “economic and social realities confronting rural and small-town Georgia blacks in the early 1920s” (Foley 181), which perfectly lines up with the timing of the poem being written and reason of the poem. Toomer felt a certain sense to talk about the parting soul of slavery leaving the African American community but why? Foley, in her article, states that “scholars read the nostalgic celebration of a vanishing peasant” (Foley 181), showing the disappearance of slavery that scholars and critics of that and this time wanted to happen, but Toomer, as opposed to: “Critics of Jean Toomer’s Cane disagree about the text’s relation to the economic and social realities confronting rural and small-town Georgia blacks in the early 1920s” (Foley

The definition of entropy in laments terms is a disorder or lack of predictability. As you can see, it is a lot like this poem of being a paradox. The stanzas have plenty of metaphors, allusions, and more literary devices. The poem is a paradox and out of order from the first read, but it reads repeatedly, and you unlock a new meaning every time, almost like Jewish meditation literature. Each stanza starts with a figure of speech; not every stanza is rhyming, and there is no order. In stanza four, we see it begin with a metaphor of “O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,” comparing black slaves to ripened plums as if ready for picking (line 16). The speaker then says, “One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes / an everlasting song, a singing tree,” which he is speaking about carrying on his or their legacy and past (line 19). The last seed and plum the speaker talks about is the child of the speaker and the heritage of the African American community through his son, which is echoed in the following stanza: “Caroling softly souls of slavery, / What they were, and what they are to me” (lines