Reapers Summary
Jean Toomer

Reapers Overview

“Reapers” is an eight-line, single stanza poem by American poet and novelist Jean Toomer. It is one of the poems in Toomer’s famous composite novel, Cane, first published in 1923. In the poem, the speaker describes reapers hard at work during Harvest time in the fields in the South. The poem ends on a somewhat startling and macabre note, with the bloody death of a field rat unwittingly caught up in the reapers’ blades and machinery.