Shine Perishing Republic

Shine Perishing Republic. Perhaps Jeffers’ most anthologised poem, with its Whitmanesque tone and rhetoric, is reflected in a sonata-like first movement form. Influenced by the paintings of Jackson Pollock, the composer wanted to saturate the musical canvas with explosive, emotive events. Evening Ebb is a nature scene. Musical metaphors – symmetrical chords, inversion structures and canons – are used to to suggest the qualities of sea and reflected sky described so beautifully in the poem. Paradoxically, in spite of these musical conceits, the music floats impressionistically, for the most part in stasis, only developing in a clear direction towards the end.