While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass
hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and
home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or
suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center;
corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the
mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable
master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught–they say–God, when he walked
on earth.
Commentary:
Robinson Jeffers, wise California poet, American prophet, wrote “Shine, Perishing Republic” in 1925—a hundred years removed from our own tumultuous time. And yet, “Shine, Perishing Republic” speaks to us from that turbulent hinge in history between the barbarism of the First World War and the horrors of the Second.
The “Roaring Twenties” were a decade of profound cultural change. The influx of immigrants swelled the major cities of America. Religious fundamentalists railed against new, progressive ideas and social expressions, trying to reclaim traditional values. With legislative actions like Prohibition traditionalists tried to reverse America’s slide into trends they considered immoral. And with the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924, they tried to stem the flood of immigrants seeking a new and better life in America.
Things haven’t changed much. Immigration is once again a hot button issue. And a new anti-immigrant ideology is part of a new “culture war” and propaganda and legislation are new weapons in that war.
“Culture wars” is not a new term. The term first appeared in the 1920s when urban and rural American values clashed and conservatives imagined themselves at war against the massive changes precipitated by decades of unfettered immigration and the dizzying shifts generated by the Industrial Revolution, the automobile, evolutionary thought, and threats to traditional religion on every front. Immigrants and Liberalism were scapegoats.
At the turn of the twentieth century, there’d been such optimism. But by the 1920s, America had been through the First World War, and now was fighting a different war within, a new cultural civil war.
It was an age not unlike our own. Only now the threats are even greater, for the tools at hand to hurt each other and the planet are bigger, much more dangerous.
From his place on the craggy California coast, Jeffers saw America’s shadow—what he called the “vulgarity” of our “heavily thickening empire.” The springtime optimism, America’s flourishing at the turn of the century, was, he prophesied, beginning to “fade” like “spring flowers.” What we cherished and trusted was falling toward “decay” and eventual “rot.”
Jeffers’ poem is eerily prescient. The twentieth century would, of course, offer us some of the most remarkable inventions, benefits, and opportunities, but it also handed us the most horrific tools and ideas used to brutalize ourselves and abuse the planet. In the hundred years since Jeffers wrote this poem, we’ve learned virtually nothing despite all we’ve explored and invented. We’re lurching through the collapse Jeffers foresaw. The shining light of the American experiment is fading, sliding toward the “decay” and “rot” that is probably inevitable, if nature’s seasons teach us anything. That history could, if we were wiser, forestall the decay, the rot, awhile. Maybe, wiser, we could even find a way to mulch a new era of flourishing with the refuse that’s a natural and inevitable by-product of our growth.
The current slide toward vulgarity, the fading flower of the once brave and promising American experiment—marred by the corruption of capitalism, fierce and deadly culture wars, and the dangers of a new authoritarianism—has been coming for quite some time. Barbarians have quietly laid siege to our republic for decades; now they’re inside our gates.
It’s easy to feel despair. Despite all our advances as a species, it seems that every hundred years or so, humanity devolves again and descends into ignorance and the cruelty that always follows in its tracks.
This is why Robinson Jeffers is so important for us now and why I’m meditating on his century-old poem.
There are many who think he’s pessimistic. But that’s a misreading of his vision.
Jeffers was a rising star in American poetry in the 1920s and 30s. His plays were produced on Broadway to large crowds and critical acclaim. Time Magazine put him on its cover in 1932. But then he plummeted. Speaking unsparingly about America’s impending decline wasn’t what America wanted during those turbulent years. His prophecy about war and tyranny was out of step with the patriotic optimism which was the political and social necessity of the times. His publisher, even at one point wrote an editorial disclaimer as a preface to one of his collections of poetry, distancing itself from the writer it has once promoted so affectionately and profitably.
Despite its critique of America, “Shine, Perishing Republic” is not pessimistic or fatalistic or unpatriotic. Instead, it draws on the cyclical patterns of nature and on a different and more durable kind of optimism—an optimism not tethered to the fragility of humanity but anchored to the durability of the Earth itself. It’s a mediation on the impermanence of all that’s superficial, balanced by the relative permanance of all that’s deep, which is far more significant.
Jeffers’ durable optimism, grounded in billions of years of natural history, means he’s not ruffled by the presence of the barbarians and the decline of America. Nor does he throw his hands up and do nothing. He simply recognizes the existential truth that all things eventually decline and die, and out of the muck on the forest floor something new always emerges: “the flower fades to make fruit,” he writes, “the fruit rots to make earth.” All things come from the earth, what Jeffers calls, our Mother, from whom all things are born again, and again, and again.
A true optimist draws strength and courage from nature. We don’t have to give in to despair or run in fear or wring our hands at the corruption. We don’t have to be intimidated by it, for as Jeffers says, “when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains”—“the mountains,” those durable sentinels to the Earth’s power to outlast every human act of hubris or horror and reproduce exquisite beauty from what we otherwise would consider “rot.”
To keep your bearings, to live the most rugged and durable hope and optimism, Jeffers urges us to love. But this is no small love; it’s not merely romantic or filial; it’s not limited to love for other human beings. In fact, he acknowledges the trouble of loving people. The disappointments, betrayals, and inevitable griefs we bear because, to love another person, means we tether ourselves to what is vulnerable, impermanent; for when we choose to love, we also choose to lose what we love, either through failure or death. That love, though valuable and necessary rises like the day lily and fades just as quickly against the backdrop of Mother Earth.
Make your love, he says, bigger that that. Much bigger.
We are part of something so much larger and grander and more enduring than our human relationships and empires. We too, and all we’ve built, will “rot” and become humus from which something new will rise . . . for awhile. And then it will decline again. Always does. That’s the beauty of the cycle of nature, and it’s wisdom.
So don’t be overly troubled by our politics, by the regimes and republics that rise and fall. Just like us, they are mortal, impermanent. But the Earth? It’s as close as we get to what’s eternal. Love that and all your smaller loves will be pulled into wonder and you’ll not be overly troubled by the trouble around us.
