“Karintha,” a focused vision, opens the seminal work Cane. The tribute to her beauty brims with the earthy eroticism of a male speaker overwhelmed by the dusky allure of a twenty-year-old. She has possessed eye-catching beauty since childhood, when the old men riding her “hobby-horse upon their knees” prefaced the prowl of lustful boys. Toomer breaks this entry into four lyric and three prose segments. Redolent with sexuality in the spring of rabbits on pine straw, the vignette depicts Karintha through potential tragedy—the failed hopes of a lush Venus “ripened too soon.” By extension, the black race, hurrying to urban industrial centers, fling easy money at their goddess of pleasure without recognizing how quickly their energizing, rejuvenating “sun goes down.” To stress his pessimism, the poet can’t resist a second “goes down.”
Prefacing a vignette called “Fern,” Toomer’s “Georgia Dusk” immerses the reader in seven stanzas extolling an idyllic black South. Sensuous and languid, the sawmill halts and people mingle at sunset in anticipation of a folk celebration—the “night’s barbecue.” A mélange of sense impressions summons “blood-hot eyes,” sweet cane, and improvised folk airs. The poet saturates the lines with alliteration (“soft settling pollen,” “pyramidal sawdust pile”), simile (“pine-needles fall like sheets of rain”), and metaphor (“blue ghosts of trees”). The poet identifies the graceful passage of celebrants down a swamp footpath with the pomp of African royalty, including king, high priests, and juju-man, or shaman. To Toomer, the import of this caroling assembly of singers and “cornfield concubines” is both erotic and holy.
“Seventh Street,” an epigraph to a prose section of Cane describing Chicago and Washington, D.C., reduces to a single quatrain a rhythmic, imagistic glimpse of city high life. He describes the good-timer spending money, bootlegger in gaudy finery, fast-moving Cadillacs, and trams as examples of living fast and grabbing as much enjoyment as possible. The depiction suits its historical setting, which Toomer lists as “Prohibition and the War,” meaning World War I. The impersonal speaker, who relishes alliteration and onomatopeia, passes no judgment on urban entertainments. Only the pain in the pocket suggests a physical need to escape through tactile, visceral pleasure.
