War, Patriotism & God - A Poem by Robinson Jeffers

In 1939, on the eve of the start of World War II, the prevaling sentiment in America was against "foreign involvements". The handwriting was on the wall, Hitler's armies were poised to invade Poland, and few people who cared to regard the realpolitik in Europe could doubt that eventually our interests and those of our allies (Great Britain and France, etc.) would converge, drawing us into another global conflict. 

 

It is in the context of this general mood, then and now, that we consider a timely "anti-war" poem by Robinson Jeffers, an unconventional and independent-minded American poet living out along the far Western edge of the continent, in a stone house he'd built with his own hands, an "isolationist" whose opposition to our participation in the Second World War would seriously influence his literary reputation.

Shine, Perishing Republic  

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 signs 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.

_____

Despite its somewhat elegant and slightly archaic rhetorical phraseology, the poem speaks quite powerfully to our present predicaments, albeit from an isolationist's point of view. Addressed ostensibly to his own sons, it is also a cynical shorthand for Jeffers's general stand against national wars:  He stood against the tide of commitment which accompanied America's entry into the War, and was ruthlessly vilified by literary critics in the years following. Yvor Winters and Kenneth Rexroth, in what must be regarded as a shameful display of turncoat Toryism, both sought to savage his reputation.

But I didn't post this poem just to resuscitate Jeffers's reputation (or to praise this relatively minor poem), which I suspect will stand or fall despite whatever I may have to say about it. What interests me are the ambiguities in the poem, which may, on first or second reading, seem simple enough, but which, on further examination, reveal contradictions and subtleties which probably undermine the poem's commonly accepted meaning(s).

You could take the poem's sarcastic irony--beginning with the title--to signify a hackneyed anti-war or anti-republican stance, a commonplace revulsion with the vulgar capitalist energies which characterized mid-20th Century America. Getting and spending, the intellectual bigotry of believing one's nation to be a superior exception, untainted by the evils of history's other failed empires. 

But it isn't America's energy, or optimism, or vanity, which Jeffers is damning; it's its "thickening," its "hardening," its rotting decadence, its corruption of feeling and principle. America was founded on dignified, worthy investments:  In individual liberty, the common good, fairness before law. Jeffers offers his encouragement:  "Life is good...a mortal splendor." 

His greatest reservation, offered to his sons, is expressed as a caution:  Avoid the "center" in cities, escape to "the mountains." 

Yet the last stanza offers a new level of ambiguity. Jeffers shifts the terms of the argument from a dialectic between patriotic loyalty and optimistic endeavor, to the master/apprentice relationship. Whereas he had previously posited the family unit (a man and his sons) in opposition to the state, society and the inertia of progress, now the dilemma is between the obeisance of the slave (or progeny) to the Elder, or "Master."  

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say--God, when he walked on earth.

Is Jeffers suggesting that Jesus--God's "son"--who "walked on earth" became an immoderate "slave" of his "Father," God? Or is it that Man was caught in God's "trap?"  

It's an intriguing ambiguity. Is Jeffers suggesting that he, as the Father, occupies the same position of authority to his sons, that Man has in relation to his God? Or is he suggesting that Jesus's vanity made him a toady to duty and homage to the ultimate "Master"?

It's almost as if Jeffers is taking an Olympian position, over Man, and the universe, observing that Man is merely a "clever servant, insufferable master." That--indeed--it is Man's tendency to worship faithfully--to observe the faith--which makes him most susceptible to the suasions of obedience, of blind faith.

The poem is not really about patriotism during wartime--or not so simply--but about the relationship between Mankind and the justifications it sets up, about the priorities which we idolize and emulate, and standards we carry into strife.