"Shine, Perishing Republic" (1925), Jeffers' most anthologized piece, contemplates the natural attrition of nations, which follow the flower in a three-stage development: fruit, decay, and absorption into earth. Characterizing the fall to earth as "home to the mother," the poet urges, "You making haste haste on decay," a deliberate repetition through a double beat to illuminate the rhythm of the process. With heavy irony, he impels the republic to emulate a meteor in hurrying toward a bright-hued demise.
At the beginning of the fourth stanza, the poet steps aside from personal wish to ponder his children, who risk corruption at "the thickening center," a viscid image that calls up visions of volcanic lava. Encouraging his sons to rise above fallen cities into moral mountains, like a god-driven Moses, he exhorts, "be in nothing so moderate as in love of man." The crux of the poem lies in the source of evil. Reflecting on classic myth, he envisions the natural lure to temptation, which even God did not elude "when he walked on earth."
"Apology for Bad Dreams" (1925) perpetuates the poet's placement of events at the extremes of good and evil. The four-part meditation expands from a view of seaside grandeur to a theatrical view of human savagery below as a woman and her son torment a horse chained by its tongue to a tree. Section II opens on bold strokes of red and black as the poet makes a choice between personal and invented suffering. Opting for literature, he justifies his choice with a warning: "It is not good to forget over what gulfs the spring / Of the beauty of humanity . . . floats to its quietness."
