Previous
11. Nullo
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
At moonrise, Coline gets sleepy. The speaker watches her fall asleep under the light of the brilliant moon and knows that he’ll be sleeping soon, too. Coline curls into a moon-shaped ball next to the speaker. Her beauty is as radiant as the moon, and she dreams with her lips “pressed against [the speaker’s] heart.”
This love poem, which is unrhymed and unmetered, has a very clear and repetitive visual shape on the page. It compares the hold the speaker’s lover, Coline, has on him with the elemental forces of nature, such as the way the moon pulls the tides.
Themes
