Blue Meridian by Jean Toomer
"Blue Meridian" is a significant poem by Jean Toomer, completed in 1931 and published in part in 1936. It is known for its prophetic themes, advocating for a vision of America where barriers between different peoples are dismantled, ultimately striving for unity and connection with the "Universal Self." The poem unfolds in a free-verse style and spans over eight hundred lines, drawing inspiration from notable figures such as Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, and the philosopher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.
Toomer's work presents a dichotomy between the "black" and "white" meridians, which symbolize racial divisions and societal constraints, contrasting with the "blue meridian," representing a harmonious convergence of all people. The Mississippi River serves as a pivotal symbol, evolving from a representation of oppression to a sacred river echoing the potential for spiritual awakening and unity within America.
Central to Toomer's vision is the belief that spiritual growth and a renewed sense of community can lead to the realization of a higher consciousness, essential for overcoming inherited prejudices and societal confines. The poem emphasizes the interconnectedness of humanity, urging readers to embrace their innate potential and seek a collective unity that transcends traditional barriers. This work, while not widely recognized during Toomer's lifetime, has gained renewed interest since the late 1960s, reflecting a broader cultural discourse on race, identity, and spirituality.
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Subject Terms
Blue Meridian by Jean Toomer
First published: 1936; expanded edition, 1980
Type of work: Poetry
Form and Content
Jean Toomer’s “Blue Meridian” is a poem of prophetic implications, arguing that in America there is the possibility for a new world vision wherein all barriers between people will be overcome. Toomer’s visionary, polemical poem focuses on those dimensions of conventional Western, particularly American, society that have sought to exclude others with whom one does not desire to identify and shows the possibilities inherent in the American people for overcoming these barriers and becoming one with the “Universal Self,” the spirit behind all existence.
The poem was originally written in the 1920’s and was completed by 1931. An early portion of the poem, “Brown River Smile,” was published in 1932. Not until 1936 was Toomer, who is best known for the original book Cane (1923), an anthology of poems, short stories, and drama centered on African Americans, able to find a publisher for “Blue Meridian.” Even then, only a portion of the lengthy poem was published. The poem was Toomer’s last significant publication during his lifetime, and though admired by a select few, it did not earn him critical attention.
Since the late 1960’s, there has been a resurgence of interest in all of Jean Toomer’s work. In 1969, Cane was reissued; this led to a renewed interest in Toomer that has continued, and in 1980, a volume containing the full text of “Blue Meridian” was published.
Written in a free-verse style reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” “Blue Meridian” combines the ideas of Whitman, William Butler Yeats, and George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, coming to a conclusion based on Gurdjieff’s philosophy of unitism. There are also echoes of Hart Crane’s The Bridge, but the dominant influence on Toomer’s poem and life during the time of the poem’s composition was Gurdjieff.
At the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, which he founded in Fontainebleau, France, in the early 1920’s, Gurdjieff taught that the universe had a definite order and that the goal of life was to recognize the common source of all being, the godhead, through a conscious spiritual yearning toward the oneness of all creatures and a search for internal harmony. This higher level of consciousness would be achieved through physical and psychological means. People should avoid overemphasizing the differences between themselves and those whom they consider the “other” and recognize a commonness of humanity and spirit.
In Toomer’s poem, Gurdjieff’s philosophy is evident in the poet’s emphasis on the search for internal harmony and in his insistence on altering one’s perceptions to such a degree that differences between people become diminished and the oneness of all begins to be acknowledged.
The poem consists of more than eight hundred lines. The poem’s lyrical movement makes it difficult to interpret chronologically, but sections of the poem that are in italics are, according to some critics, the key to understanding the poem. In fact, one might even suggest that the sections in italics may be read as a separate poem. Certainly, the most important aspects of these sections are their movement from the black, to the white, to the blue meridian—representing an alteration in perception from the conventional categories of black and white to the symbol of the unity of all peoples and ideals in the middle ground, or meridian. Critic Jean Wagner refers to the “blue meridian” as the “synthesis of the Black and White Meridians.”
At the opening of the poem, Toomer introduces readers to the theme of America’s potentiality. The America he envisions would be capable of oneness with the godhead if all Americans, members of a special race of people, willingly committed themselves to being “spiritualized.” Immediately thereafter, he juxtaposes the two-line opening with lines in italics on the “black meridian,” the symbol of racial difference and oppression and of an extreme worldview that America must learn to overcome in order to reach the ultimate goal of oneness, which is symbolized later in the poem as the “blue meridian.” He urges readers to seek their spiritual side and to destroy all barriers separating human beings from each other and from God.
Like Whitman, Toomer uses “I” to represent the Universal Self, who is one with God. Circular images abound to represent the unity of all being. If humans—particularly Toomer’s ideal race of Americans—were willing to “Let the Big Light in,” the union of themselves with God and the spirit would be possible. Rooted in Eastern religion and philosophy, these ideas are derived from both Gurdjieff and Whitman.
Toomer soon introduces readers to another significant symbol, the Mississippi River. He sees the Mississippi as the equivalent in the West to the Eastern and Indian Ganges, which is considered a sacred river. He suggests that if Americans would commit themselves to becoming one with the universe and God, the Mississippi would be lifted to “become/ in the spirit of America, a sacred river.” At this point, the Mississippi has the potential of being a sacred river; when he returns to it much later in the poem, it is referred to as a sacred river because, in his vision, Americans relinquish all the false barriers and weaknesses of the races of which it is composed.
In the next section, Toomer, like Whitman, lists the varieties of Americans and suggests that they make up a complete whole—a oneness. More particularly, he declares that, whether one is of the East or the West, the human being is spiritually united to all through “an essence identical in all.” Moreover, the old gods have died and a new god of spirit and oneness must be found through such recognition of unity; again, the assumption in the last section of the poem is that this new unity will be realized.
Toomer then moves on to characterize the types of peoples who originally inhabited America. He begins with the Europeans, who, as a result of the rising industrialization of America, were overcome and “baptized in finance”—that is, materialism. People became nothing more than commodities “sold by national organizations of undertakers.” The African race, to which Toomer next turns, was forced to leave their homeland of “shining ground” and to possess “the watermelon”—a symbol of the victimization and oppression of African Americans. Also making up the American nation is the “great red race,” who, destined to be united with a new race Toomer labels “American,” also waited for “a new people,/ For the joining of men to men/ And man to God.” The Native American’s gods came down and sank into the earth, and they “fertilize the seven regions of America.” As the poem progresses, Toomer suggests that these false barriers between people will be torn down when Americans begin to see themselves as the new race of people they are.
The land of America itself, a New World, is then described as “a vacuum compelled by nature to be filled” with a new race of people representing “all peoples of the earth.” Nevertheless, though there was this potential in America from the beginning, “The alien and the belonging,/ All belonging now” had “not yet [been] made one and aged.”
The next section, which is repeated with slight variations several times throughout the poem, is in the form of a prayer asking for inspiration in the souls and minds of the American people:
O thou, Radiant Incorporeal,
Here the speaker asks the divine to fill the souls of all with the yearning to become one, and in the next stanza, Toomer characterizes the East Coast as masculine and the West Coast as feminine (a pattern that he reverses later in the poem to emphasize his idea of the circular nature of all), with the middle symbolizing the child, a reconciling force. There must be the desire for a reconciliation for humans to be able to achieve the proper level of consciousness.
The next several stanzas, which are interrupted briefly with a juxtaposition of lines in italics concerned with the “golden grain,” concentrate on the vision of a New America in the process of becoming what it has the potential of becoming. Only if each new American is committed to spirituality will America reach its spiritual capabilities. However, there are barriers: the past, which is connected to hell and blinds the human race to its potentiality, the distrust of the divine, the loss of spiritual awareness, the disillusionment of the years following World War I, the nature of the American people themselves (symbolized by the eagle, which represents the divine life force as well as the potential for destruction), the tendency to use violence and weaponry (even among the intelligentsia), and the inherited shackles of tradition and society (Toomer calls modern society “a prison system of all wardens”). If the new race called Americans cannot move ahead, Toomer suggests, it is due to humans’ tendency to hold themselves back. Nevertheless, since “it [the racket of human society] begins with us,/ So we must end it.”
At this point, the poet calls humans to action and to liberation from all those barriers that separate them from one another other and from the divine. More “simple things” must be embraced; masks and barriers must be discarded. The goal of life is to grow spiritually:
We who would transform ex-I to I
In this section, Toomer also introduces in italics the white meridian, which, unlike the black meridian with which the poem opens, is “waking on an inland lake,” suggesting the gradual coming of the blue meridian, the word “waking” implying that the new vision is through the course of time gradually going to be made possible.
After a three-line commentary on the white meridian, Toomer returns to the barriers interfering with spiritual growth. Control itself is a form of imprisonment; some examples of control mentioned are fear, prejudice, murder, and tradition. The modern world is a “wreckage” of “homesick ghosts” that must be overcome through a rejection of the old perceptions and the past. Rather than live, humans, who have become dehumanized in the machinery of modern society, are in despair; yet they must discover the goal of living, of opening themselves up to a spiritual vision of life. Those things by which humans allow themselves to be imprisoned symbolize to Toomer the “shrinkage” of human potential. The human race is made to “flow and expand,” not to shrink and limit. Toomer then catalogs, in one of the poem’s most important passages, the varieties of imprisonment in human society: race, ethnicity, nation, region, sex, class, occupation, religion, and others, stating his theme rather obviously in discussing the realization of “pure consciousness of being.”
Drawing readers’ attention to the natural world as a reflection of the divine, Toomer describes the beauty of nature as “a sacred factory” and suggests the pathways to the “sun,” or human potential and the divine. Speaking for himself, yet using the universal “I,” the poet points out that even though he lived for and was approved of by society, he was caught in a trap until he found the source of all being, which is symbolized by the river. His spiritual awareness was brought about partly due to the influence of a woman (critics have commented that this is probably an autobiographical reference to Toomer’s brief infatuation with the wife of Waldo Frank). Though he and the woman “parted,” their relationship brought him to a new awareness of being and a dissatisfaction with “the world I wound around me.”
While he listens to the recordings of others on a phonograph, he now hears himself—again suggesting the oneness of all being. He has begun to recognize the constant flow of being, of human existence, and he has come to envision the sun as a sacrament, for it symbolizes spirit and God. As he looks at the possibilities for America, he recognizes the circular nature of the universe as he looks out from some of the highest buildings in New York City. He sees the wheels of the steam engine as representing the fundamental unity of all things and the continuous journey of being.
The poem shifts, after a juxtaposition suggesting that there is the potential in Americans to become “matter superbly human,” to a present recognition of America’s potential. Toomer, while earlier in the poem suggesting that America has not become what it is capable of becoming, now imagines that it has. As a result, he repeats a number of lines used earlier in the poem and modifies certain lines to suggest this altered vision of America. The old gods he has mentioned earlier now have become the “new God we have,” that is, “the god who is, the God we seek.” The dead spirits of the Europeans who peopled America are reborn through a revival of the spirit of the individual. Americans are a living, breathing race capable of the highest potentials to which humanity can reach: “Americans, to suffer, and rejoice, create,/ To live in body and all births.”
Contributing also to Toomer’s vision of the New America are the Africans, who “immortalize a hiding water boy” (or the common person), and the poet himself, who, like Whitman’s poet, shows the equality and oneness of all and is a man “at large among men.” Native Americans, whose gods earlier were described as sinking into the earth to fertilize, now have gods who “Sank into the sacred earth/ To resurrect”—another symbol of rebirth.
The next section explains more clearly the poet’s use of the black and white meridians. Toomer equates black and white, two extremes, with yes and no, two other extremes, as a way to suggest the dangers of extremity that have led to barriers between people and the divine. For the survival of the human and divine spirit, Americans pave the way by giving up the narrow perceptions of everything as being either black or white:
Black is black, white is white,
Yes and no become one in Toomer’s world of unity, and America is the culmination of centuries of convergence toward union with the divine.
Returning to the Mississippi River, a symbol of American unity, Toomer now deems it a “sacred river.” The circular image of the river and the flowing of the river have been used throughout to represent the oneness of all with the Universal Self. While earlier the West Coast had represented the feminine and the East Coast the masculine, Toomer now reverses these to reemphasize his belief in the fundamental unity of all—and the androgynous nature of all being. Repeating himself, he declares that “life is given to have/ Realized in our consciousness . . . This real,” what he terms the “resplendent source” of all being. America’s natural beauty symbolizes the majestic oneness of all existence.
As the poem closes, Toomer again uses italics, this time to reflect on the “blue meridian,” his symbol for the fundamental recognition of the convergence and oneness of all. Left and right are united; light is awakened upon the earth. Blue Meridian, the symbol of the human being who has reached the awareness of the highest potential, “dances the dance of the Blue Meridian/ And dervishes with the seven regions/ of America, and all the world.” Toomer ends by reemphasizing the need for humans—particularly Americans—to try to bring themselves to an awareness of their highest potential (and consciousness) and “the operations of the cosmos”:
Beyond plants are animals,
Critical Context
Like Whitman, Toomer saw America as a symbol of human potential. America, as a symbol of freedom from conventional Western restraint and limitations, offers the hope of salvation for the human race. The poem reflects the quest or yearning toward the ideals Toomer espouses of unity, oneness, and deemphasis on the barriers between people. Throughout, Toomer emphasizes imprisonment, confinement, and enslavement and tries to call readers to action to loose the shackles of conventional society and tradition.
One of the most important sections of the poem is placed just past the halfway point. Having established the numerous barriers that prevent growth of spirit and humanity, Toomer states:
Unlock the races,
Several stanzas later, Toomer’s point becomes clearer:
Uncase, unpod whatever blocks, until,
These lines summarize the poem’s major thesis: The false barriers of conventional society have done nothing more than imprison and enslave the human family; moreover, these barriers, whether they be of race, nation, region, sex, class, or creed, have brought about a gradual deterioration of human spirit and potential that, in turn, prevent connection with and consciousness of the spiritual dimensions of life. As Jean Wagner, one of the best critics of Toomer’s poem, has written, “The fundamental thesis of ’Blue Meridian’ is the need for a regenerated America, to be achieved through the regeneration of each individual and each community composing it, of an America once more united around the spiritual dream of its founders.”
Bibliography
Egar, Emmanuel E. The Poetics of Rage: Wole Soyinka, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2005. Study of the political aesthetics of Toomer and two other major black poets.
Fabre, Geneviève, and Michel Feith, eds. Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Anthology of scholarly articles on the relationship between Toomer and other Harlem Renaissance writers.
Ford, Karen Jackson. Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernity. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Reads Toomer’s works as exemplary of African American modernism.
Kerman, Cynthia Earl, and Richard Eldridge. The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. First full-length biographical study of Toomer. Kerman and Eldridge emphasize the personal, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of Toomer’s quest for a mystical experience with God and demonstrate what seems to have been Toomer’s failure to achieve the oneness he so desperately desired. Includes a bibliography of primary and secondary material.
McKay, Nellie Y. Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Effective critical study that includes analyses of Cane and “Blue Meridian.” Focusing on the relationship between Toomer’s works and events of his life, McKay emphasizes that Toomer failed to live up to his potential as a writer because he became involved in religious and philosophical issues. Includes an index and a primary and secondary bibliography.
O’Daniel, Therman B., ed. Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988. Excellent, lengthy collection of critical essays on the works of Toomer. While focused primarily on Cane, the collection includes discussions of Toomer’s relationship with Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, and Hart Crane and sections on Toomer as poet and playwright. The section on poetry, while brief, will assist readers in understanding “Blue Meridian.” Bibliography.
Toomer, Jean. The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Edited by Darwin T. Turner. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980. Organized by genre, this collection contains many previously unpublished and uncollected works of Toomer, including the complete text of “Blue Meridian,” autobiographical writings, plays, and fiction. Turner’s useful introduction contains general background material on Toomer’s life and philosophy.
Turner, Darwin T. In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Primarily biographical, this early introduction to the life and works of Toomer is a useful overview of Toomer’s life and the main issues in Cane. Turner emphasizes the quest for a unified self in the life of Toomer and suggests that Toomer’s commitment to his search for an identity apart from the one assigned to him by his culture and his philosophical and religious views limited his success as a writer.
Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Translated by Kenneth Douglas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973. Wagner’s excellent study devotes an entire chapter to Toomer’s life and work, emphasizing the poetry of Toomer in Cane and “Blue Meridian” and the desperate search for unity throughout Toomer’s life. Includes a short bibliography of secondary material.