SHINE, PERISHING REPUBLIC

By: Robinson Jeffers
March 17, 2025

A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.

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.

— First published in 1925 in the collection Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems. The poem describes an increasingly corrupt American empire, which it advises us to view through the naturalizing perspective of social cycles. Jeffers would in the 1930s write two companion poems: “Shine, Republic” and “Shine, Empire”.

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RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.