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.

It describes an increasingly corrupt American empire, which it advises readers to view through the naturalizing perspective of social cycles.

Jeffers describes an America which after World War I had secured its position as the dominant power in the West, and thereby definitely had abandoned the agrarian vision of the Jeffersonian republic.

[5] Discarding American exceptionalism, Jeffers views the United States—now more prosperous than ever and in the age of skyscrapers—as an integral and leading example of a broader crisis of the West.

[2] The poem offers an answer to how both corruption and meaningless opposition can be avoided: this is achieved by taking refuge in the "mountains", which, according to the scholar Robert Zaller, refers to "the ground of landscape itself and hence of access to the sublime".

His rejection of anthropocentrism is reflected in the final lines, which evoke Christianity's belief in God's incarnation as Christ, signifying a love for man that the poem dismisses as a "trap".

Against the experimentalism of his Modernist contemporaries, Jeffers demonstrates the power of rhetoric and direct statement to express complex emotion and political protest.

[9] "Shine, Empire", which references Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, was written prior to the outbreak of World War II and published in Be Angry at the Sun and Other Poems (1941).

The same naturalizing aloofness, applied in the original poem to the exuberance and decadence of the Jazz Age, is here targeted at the Great Depression and the approaching war, which has led to charges of cruelty and fascist sympathies.