The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer

Robert B. Jones, Margot Toomer Latimer, Robert B. Jones, Margot Toomer Latimer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781469616414
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie américaine

This volume is the only collected edition of poems by Jean Toomer, the enigmatic American writer, Gurdjieffian guru, and Quaker convert who is perhaps best known for his 1923 lyrical narrative Cane. The fifty-five poems here -- most of them previously unpublished -- chart a fascinating evolution of artistic consciousness. The book is divided into sections reflecting four distinct periods of creativity in Toomer's career. The Aesthetic period includes Imagist, Symbolist, and other experimental pieces, such as "Five Vignettes, " while "Georgia Dusk" and the newly discovered poem "Tell Me" come from Toomer' s Ancestral Consciousness period in the early 1920s. "The Blue Meridian" and other Objective Consciousness poems reveal the influence of idealist philosopher Georges Gurdjieff. Among the works of this period the editor presents a group of local color poems picturing the landscape of the American Southwest, including "Imprint for Rio Grande." "It Is Everywhere, " another newly discovered poem, celebrates America and democratic idealism. The Quaker religious philosophy of Toomer's final years is demonstrated in such Christian Existential works as "They Are Not Missed" and "To Gurdjieff Dying." Robert Jones's clear and comprehensive introduction examines the major poems in this volume and serves as a guide through the stages of Toomer's evolution as an artist and thinker. The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer will prove essential to Toomer's admirers as well as to scholars and students of modern poetry, Afro-American literature, and American studies.

THE OBJECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS PERIOD (1924–1939)

THE LOST DANCER

Spatial depths of being survive
The birth to death recurrences
Of feet dancing on earth of sand;
Vibrations of the dance survive
The sand; the sand, elect, survives
The dancer. He can find no source
Of magic adequate to bind
The sand upon his feet, his feet
Upon his dance, his dance upon
The diamond body of his being.

HONEY OF BEING

Always your heart, atomic symbol,
Wherein experience returns
To essence and I know source
And end identical; your love,
Reason and creativeness,
Perfect, our aspirations seek,
And, having found, in ecstasy
Fold their wings upon fulfillment.

ANGELIC EVE

Strong threads have bound your starry life
Within a silver-silken chrysalis,
The world’s prize,
And its first object of envy.
Strong hands have shaded your clear sight
Within luxurious slumber,
Where, safe from the white solar
And the black sun of night,
You have been kept virginal.
But now, though I am unskilled in magic,
Too blunt a key to unlock souls,
You stir, and your waking life
Makes my eyes luminous to see
Angelic Eve,
The silk as wings upon her feet,
Emerging from undifferentiated air.

MERL

The waves know rocks by foam and recklessness,
An eager wish to make a long sand beach;
The gulls know waves by silver wriggling streaks,
The air is sensitive to gulls. As These,
I know Maine and her–trees evergreen,
Pine, spruce, and fir; a clear cool dawn,
A swelling sea, and rocks, great grey shoulders
Hunched, strong against the free wild waves;
I see Merl standing there, her hair
Rimmed by spray and rainbowed by sunshine.

WHITE ARROW

Your force is greater than your use of it.
Existing, yet you dream that breath depends
On bonds I once contracted for. It is
A false belief induced by sleep and fear.
In faith and reason you were swift and free,
White arrow, as you were, awake and be!

UNSUSPECTING

There is a natty kind of mind
That slicks its thoughts,
Culls its oughts,
Trims its views,
Prunes its trues,
And never suspects it is a rind.

THE GODS ARE HERE

This is no mountain
But a house,
No rock of solitude
But a family chair,
No wilds
But life appearing
As life anywhere domesticated,
Yet I know the gods are here,
And that if I touch them
I will arise
And take majesty into the kitchen.

AT SEA

Once I saw large waves
Crested with white-caps;
A driving wind
Transformed the caps
Into scudding spray–
“Swift souls,” I addressed them–
They turned towards me
Startled
Sea-descending faces;
But I, not they,
Felt the pang of transience.

UPWARD IS THIS ACTUALITY

Upward is this Actuality,
Octaves beyond the idols
Aspired to in biped picturing.
Not Jacob pillowed on the rock
Could dream this prospect–
I walk through the Universe . . .
Beholding marble as emanation,
Love and ashes, the first pure dust,
And One, perfected striver,
The bridegroom of the cross,
Conveys the dart
To crack this gravestone.

AS THE EAGLE SOARS

It takes a well-spent lifetime, and perhaps more, to crystallize in us that for which we exist.

Let your doing be an exercise, not an exhibition.

Man is a nerve of the cosmos, dislocated, trying to quiver into place.

A true individual is not conformative but formative.

We move and hustle but lack rhythm.

We should have a living spirit and the ability to spiritualize experience.

We do not suffer: seldom does our essence suffer, but pride, vanity, egotism suffer in us.

My breathing is the Great Breath broken into nostrils.

Whatever is, is sacred.

BE WITH ME

I hoped that you
Would help me tap the second stream
And reverse my steps, the ages
I have walked away
Seeking I knew not what.

You did not fail me;
To the second station I did not arise,
Hearing the strange accents
Of our native language
While those around me
Call me dead.

Dead to the first
I live to the second;
And when I die where now I live,
And all these people call me dead,
Do you, dark sister,
Not forsake me.

THE BLUE MERIDIAN

It is a new America,
To be spiritualized by each new American.

Black Meridian, black light,
Dynamic atom-aggregate,
Lay sleeping on an inland lake.

Lift, lift, thou waking forces!
Let us feel the energy of animals,
The force of rumps and bull-bent heads
Crashing the barrier to man.
It must spiral on!
A million million men, or twelve men,
Must crash the barrier to the next higher form.

Beyond plants are animals,
Beyond animals is man,
Beyond man is the universe.

The Big Light,
Let the Big Light in!

O thou, Radiant Incorporeal,
The I of earth and of mankind, hurl
Down these seaboards, across this continent,
The thousand-rayed discus of thy mind,
And above our walking limbs unfurl
Spirit-torsos of exquisite strength!

The Mississippi, sister of the Ganges,
Main artery of earth in the western world,
Is waiting to become
In the spirit of America, a sacred river,
Whoever lifts the Mississippi
Lifts himself and all America;
Whoever lifts himself
Makes that great brown river smile.
The blood of earth and the blood of man
Course swifter and rejoice when we spiritualize.

We–priest, clown, scientist, technician,
Artist, rascal, worker, lazybones,
This is the whole–
Individuals and people,
This is the whole that stood with Adam
And has come down to us,
Never to be less,
Whatever side is up, however viewed,
Whatever the vicissitudes,
The needs of evolution that bring
Emphasis upon a part–
Man himself, his total body and soul,
This is the moving whole.

Men of the East, men of the West,
Men in life, men in death,
Americans and all countrymen–
Growth is by admixture from less to more,
Preserving the great granary intact,
Through cycles of death and life,
Each stage a pod,
Perpetuating and perfecting
An essence identical in all,
Obeying the same laws, unto the same goal,
That far-distant objective,
By ways both down and up,
Down years ago, now struggling up.

So lift, lift, thou waking forces!

The old gods, led by an inverted Christ,
A shaved Moses, a blanched Lemur,
And a moulting Thunderbird,
Withdrew into the distance and died,
Their dust and seed drifting down
To fertilize the seven regions of America.

We are waiting for a new God.
For revelation in our day,
For growth towards faceless Deity.

The old peoples–
The great European races sent wave after wave
That washed the forests, the earth’s rich loam,
Grew towns with the seeds of giant cities,
Made roads, laid silver rails,
Sang of their swift achievement,
And perished, displaced by machines,
Smothered by a world too huge for little men,
Too empty for life to breathe in.
They say that near the end
It was a world of crying men and hard women,
A city of goddamn and Jehovah
Baptized in finance
Without benefit of saints,
Of dear defectives
Winnowing their likenesses from synthetic rock
Sold by national organizations of undertakers.

Someone said:
Blood cannot mix with the stuff upon our boards
As water with ...