Purple Mountain Majesty from America The Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates O beautiful for spacious skies For amber waves of grain For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea! O beautiful for pilgrim feet Whose stern impassioned stress A thoroughfare of freedom beat Across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flaw Confirm thy soul in self-control Thy liberty in law! O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife Who more than self their country loved And mercy more than life! America! America! May God thy gold refine Till all success be nobleness And every gain divine! “The first draft of "America the Beautiful" was hastily jotted down in a notebook during the summer of 1893, which Bates spent teaching English at The Colorado Summer School (affiliated with Colorado College) in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Later she remembered: One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse. Ponder explains how Bates had personally experienced sexist prejudice and discrimination, had witnessed the ravages of the industrial revolution in both America and Britain, had seen first hand urban poverty and misery, and keenly wished for equality. Ponder shows that it was this desire for an all-inclusive egalitarian American community that inspired the poem, which was written during the severe economic depression of 1893. The words to her famous poem first appeared in print in The Congregationalist, a weekly journal, for Independence Day, 1895. The poem reached a wider audience when her revised version was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript on November 19, 1904. Her final expanded version was written in 1913.” - Wikipedia #PurpleMountainMajesty #KatherineLeeBates #AmericaTheBeautiful #WomenPoets https://www.instagram.com/p/BxV0KEQgqyI/?igshid=na6pb5giqqpm
