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1. Karintha
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Cane, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Navigating Identity
Racism in the Jim Crow Era
Feminine Allure
Nature vs. Society
The Power and Limitations of Language
Summary
Analysis
Black people harvesting hay sharpen their scythes, then begin to cut hay, following a horse-drawn cart through the field. One harvester accidentally slices a fleeing field rat but doesn’t stop working.
The first poem in the collection is rather formal, consisting of 4 rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. This formality contrasts with the plainness of the imagery, which describes the difficult (and occasionally dangerous) agricultural labor still being performed mostly manually by Black people in the South in the early 20th century.
Themes
