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26. Prayer
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
The reaper has finished a long and grueling harvest and is now too tired to cook the grains and eat them. They know they are surrounded by other reapers in other fiends, but they’re so exhausted they might as well be deaf and blind, because they can’t call out or see anyone, and they know the other harvesters are just as exhausted as they are.
The Northern section poem, “Harvest Song” convers similar themes to the Southern section poems “Reapers” and “Cotton Song,” yet without the sense of joy and pride and connection. This sense of fatigue suggests that the work is not done—that there is still a long way to go for American society to overcome its racism and prejudice. And it again emphasizes, as do many of the pieces in the Northern section, the difficult trade made by people who left life in the rural south for the economic opportunities—but urban isolation—of the North.
Themes
