“America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.”—“America the Beautiful,” lyrics by Katharine Lee Bates, music by Samuel Ward, in The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation, edited by Diane Ravitch (1990)
The words that everyone knows in this song come from the first stanza, the one filled with the astonishing physical beauty of the sprawling United States—notably, the “purple mountain majesties/above the fruited plain.”
But there’s more to the lyrics than that, and it’s worth recalling now, exactly 115 years to the day that the poem “America the Beautiful” was published by Wellesley professor of English Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) in the religious weekly The Congregationalist. She was lucky to live in a time when a) newspapers still proliferated, b) they loved to print poems, and c) poetry was unafraid to deal with accessible public concerns rather than allusive, private obsessions.
“America the Beautiful” was inspired by a western trip that Bates took in the summer of 1893, beginning at Niagara Falls and ending in Colorado. Upon ascending Pike’s Peak, she immediately wrote down her impressions, but it took her awhile to translate it into a form she felt worthy of publication.
Bates’ poem elicited an enormous response from readers, many of whom felt it practically begged to be turned into song. At one point, approximately 70 different melodies were proposed as possible accompaniment to the lyrics. The winner, by common acclimation, was a melody from a Christian hymn book, composed by New Jersey choirmaster Samuel Ward in 1882.
Bates (whose image accompanying this post reminds me of what another Kathy Bates might have looked like in youth—the Oscar-winning actress of Misery) revised the poem twice more over the next two decades, to make it more direct—and, one would hope, capable of being sung.
Those of a certain ideological stripe might well be put off by the unabashed patriotism of the poem. Though not as bellicose as, say, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” certain lines might raise hackles with those concerned with America’s wars (“O beautiful for heroes proved/In liberating strife”) or the impact of its westward expansion on the environment (“A thoroughfare for freedom beat/Across the wilderness!”)
But there’s the above quote, from the second stanza, implying so much more. America might indeed be beautiful, but it isn’t perfect. That “liberating strife” was present, for instance, because a queasy bargain had been struck at the nation’s founding that slavery would not be interfered with in order that a united front could be presented against Great Britain.
The child of a Congregationalist minister, Bates felt the nation required divine guidance to “mend thine every flaw.” At the same time, you can sense the insistent note of her religious tradition’s tendency toward ruthless self-examination—an impulse that, in the 19th century, manifested itself in one reform movement after another—in the couplet, “Confirm thy soul in self-control,/Thy liberty in law.”
In other words, Bates realized that America was beautiful not simply because of pristine wilderness but because of the second chance it offered—to battered foreigners starting over in life, as well as to native-born citizens bringing honor to a badly compromised past.
The words that everyone knows in this song come from the first stanza, the one filled with the astonishing physical beauty of the sprawling United States—notably, the “purple mountain majesties/above the fruited plain.”
But there’s more to the lyrics than that, and it’s worth recalling now, exactly 115 years to the day that the poem “America the Beautiful” was published by Wellesley professor of English Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) in the religious weekly The Congregationalist. She was lucky to live in a time when a) newspapers still proliferated, b) they loved to print poems, and c) poetry was unafraid to deal with accessible public concerns rather than allusive, private obsessions.
“America the Beautiful” was inspired by a western trip that Bates took in the summer of 1893, beginning at Niagara Falls and ending in Colorado. Upon ascending Pike’s Peak, she immediately wrote down her impressions, but it took her awhile to translate it into a form she felt worthy of publication.
Bates’ poem elicited an enormous response from readers, many of whom felt it practically begged to be turned into song. At one point, approximately 70 different melodies were proposed as possible accompaniment to the lyrics. The winner, by common acclimation, was a melody from a Christian hymn book, composed by New Jersey choirmaster Samuel Ward in 1882.
Bates (whose image accompanying this post reminds me of what another Kathy Bates might have looked like in youth—the Oscar-winning actress of Misery) revised the poem twice more over the next two decades, to make it more direct—and, one would hope, capable of being sung.
Those of a certain ideological stripe might well be put off by the unabashed patriotism of the poem. Though not as bellicose as, say, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” certain lines might raise hackles with those concerned with America’s wars (“O beautiful for heroes proved/In liberating strife”) or the impact of its westward expansion on the environment (“A thoroughfare for freedom beat/Across the wilderness!”)
But there’s the above quote, from the second stanza, implying so much more. America might indeed be beautiful, but it isn’t perfect. That “liberating strife” was present, for instance, because a queasy bargain had been struck at the nation’s founding that slavery would not be interfered with in order that a united front could be presented against Great Britain.
The child of a Congregationalist minister, Bates felt the nation required divine guidance to “mend thine every flaw.” At the same time, you can sense the insistent note of her religious tradition’s tendency toward ruthless self-examination—an impulse that, in the 19th century, manifested itself in one reform movement after another—in the couplet, “Confirm thy soul in self-control,/Thy liberty in law.”
In other words, Bates realized that America was beautiful not simply because of pristine wilderness but because of the second chance it offered—to battered foreigners starting over in life, as well as to native-born citizens bringing honor to a badly compromised past.
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