Long Lines, No Rhyme (Free Verse)
Do you like your lines short and rhyming? Well, get your hankies ready; we have bad news. Jeffers just isn't feeling the whole jaunty meter and dance-around-in-circles thing. His speaker prefers his lines in "Shine, Perishing Republic" to sound just as grim as his message. There's no place for singsong-y couplets when you're talking about the apocalypse, or something like it. Instead, he uses that long narrative form that Walt Whitman is well-known for. That's why one line sometimes looks like it's two (lines 2, 3, 4, for example), but it's really just one long line that's hit the right margin and kept going onto the next. Those extra words kinda dangle out in space, but they're not counted as a separate line.
The effect of having such a long narrative sounding form is one that makes a poem sound more like prose or an expository essay on America. We're not waiting for a catch phrase or pair of words to make our hearts flutter and sing. Instead we're looking for truth in this poem, or at least a perspective that gets at the heart of mankind's patterns of cultural growth and decay. And when we're dealing with such complicated ideas, our speaker needs some elbowroom to flex his poo-pooing muscles (don't be gross, Shmoopers—you know what we mean).
He also needs a lot of commas—each line has at least two or three—in order to fully bring to life the kinds of patterns that persist throughout history, whether in nature or politics. Visually, we can see the pieces fit together from the flower fading to make fruit and the fruit rotting to make earth (line 3). If we were to separate these clauses into their own lines, the effect wouldn't be a cyclical one that unifies everything. They would look more independent, you know, like Beyoncé.
Besides commas, we also see some colons and semicolons throughout the poem that also serve to link the speaker's ideas together. Meteors are linked with mountains that are then linked to the main idea that America's republic ought to shine on (line 6). Squishing it all into one thought makes us remember the speaker's idea that we can't wish for only the creative or destructive forces of the universe. We need both, and there's no denying the fact that what's created will eventually be destroyed in one context or another only to be reborn again. By the end we realize that the poem's form acts like the glue that visually extends and combines all of the speaker's ideas into one natural cycle of growth, decay, rebirth, and a shining potential beneath it all.