"Shine, Perishing Republic"
The first stanza—shorter than the second—characterizes America as a vulgar, imperialistic cesspool of corruption. The second stanza turns the focus on the reader by addressing “You” in the opening line. The tone turns somewhat conciliatory by refusing to take the road of blaming individuals for seeking a good life personally at perhaps the expense of larger ideals.
“Hurt Hawks”
Part I commences with a description of the injuries suffered by the title bird before moving toward a more metaphorical consideration of the loss of the ability to fly and empower itself in place of becoming prey waiting for a predator it may once have eyed from above. Part II describes the painful decision of the speaker to commit a mercy killing of the bird to put it out of its physical and psychic misery.
“Rock and Hawk”
The appearance of a hawk in another poem—and another title—is highly indicative of the subject matter pursued by the poet to formulate his thematic tapestries. In this poem, the hawk is specified as a falcon perched on the titular gray stone which has managed to withstand the test of time and natural disaster. Animal and mineral combined to form a symbolic image of the values attributed to man.
“On Building with Stone”
Moving from bird to bird, let’s move from rock to stone. Animals and minerals play an enormous role in the body of work produced by Jeffers and the opening line of this introduces an ape. It is metaphorical, of course, and this very short poem is an example of the more abstract ruminations of the poet. While it consists of just eight lines, it may be more difficult to penetrate than poems three times longer. Allusions to Great Pyramids are easy enough to identify, but unless one immediately recognizes the reference to Archilochus and Homer (he will pop up later) and can explicate the perhaps confusing commingling of slavery and stone-building, be prepared to work hard.
“The Beauty of Things”
The title of this poem is a phrase that recurs throughout the work of the poet, sometimes by direct quote and more usually as a thematic template. This poem is essentially a celebration of what it seems: earth, beast, unhuman nature, etc. And all things of beauty move swiftly but inexorably toward the poem’s central conceit: “Beauty is the sole business of poetry.”
“The Epic Stars”
If one is sensing that the poetry of Robinson Jeffers is weighted heavily toward an appreciation of the natural forms of the universe, one would be wise to keep pursuing that thought. This short poem is a conglomeration of metaphor and symbol which situates stars as being in the business of going out of business: they are compared to bullets fired in a lost cause. The poem moves unexpected toward an implicit critique of apathy in the form of the legendary poet Homer taking stars and Gods too much for granted.
“Greater Grandeur”
This poem provides a little change of pace to reveal that Jeffers was not constrained just by the natural word; he has a political landscape to play around within as well and in a sense we shall leave where we began. The poem situates the time: six months following the end of World War II. Hitler and FDR are both literally dead while Stalin and Churchill are in their own particular symbolic stasis of near-death. The world has triumphed over evil and the triumph is declared to be Democracy. The tone and mood is hardly celebratory, however; it is characterized more as a grudgingly memorialized confession that the post-war world is not enjoying a time of peace, but merely lying in wait for the whole thing to begin again, over and over, never ending.
