4 Must-Read Jean Toomer Poems

Jean Toomer was an important African American author. He worked as a poet and playwright and his work is noted for its experimentation. The latter is certainly true for his best-known form, Cane, a book about Black workers on a southern farm.

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Reapers

‘Reapers’ by Jean Toomer is a thoughtful poem about oppression. It is depicted through a very poetic and memorable metaphor depicting field workers and a mower.

Jean Toomer’s poem ‘Reapers’ shows how he could say something powerful using very few words. The poem gives a simple but strong message about the way people and machines move through life, often without care for what they harm. While it’s not his most famous work, it’s still one of his most discussed poems. What makes ‘Reapers’ stand out is how much it says about control, routine, and destruction in just eight short lines.

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones

Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones

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Georgia Dusk

Toomer lived through a time of seeing the effects slavery still had on the American people. The poem and title, ‘Georgia Dusk’, provides such a setting.

The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue

The setting sun, too indolent to hold

A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,

Passively darkens for night’s barbecue,

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November Cotton Flower

‘November Cotton Flower’ by Jean Toomer is a powerful extended metaphor for the lives of Black men, women, and children in the southern United States. It alludes to slavery and the hope that the Civil Rights Movement presented.

Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,

Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,

And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,

Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,

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Portrait in Georgia

Toomer’s ‘Portrait in Georgia’ juxtaposes a woman’s allure with lynching symbols, exposing deep racial injustices in a striking critique.

Hair–braided chestnut,

coiled like a lyncher’s rope,

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4 Must-Read Jean Toomer Poems

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