How old is america the beautiful

O beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years Thine alabaster cities gleam Undimmed by human tears! See more Latest features. Royal Ballet. See more Browse by. The latest version was set to Samuel A. The accompaniment stuck, and that version is the one Americans know and love today. Bates drew from what she saw in Massachusetts, Colorado, and everything in between to write her poem.

The man-made aspects of the country inspired Bates as well. O beautiful for halcyon skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the enameled plain! God shed His grace on thee, Till souls wax fair as earth and air And music-hearted sea! O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain!

She taught Shakespeare, and she wrote poetry. She loved to travel. At her rambling Victorian house, a brisk walk from campus, she kept dozens of souvenirs, propped up on the mantel, displayed in glass-doored cabinets: a brass Buddha from China, an alabaster urn from an Egyptian tomb, a bottle of sand from Panama. But Katharine Lee Bates is best remembered for a single trip she took in , a pilgrimage across the United States , and for the poem she wrote about that trip.

She left Boston by train on June 29, She spent July 4 in the prairie, in western Kansas , eyeing its amber waves of grain. She taught her course and then, near the end of July, she went on an expedition to the Garden of the Gods , where red sandstone rises out of the earth in formations that look like so many cathedral spires.

She headed next to a 14,foot mountain called Tava, or Sun Mountain, by the Ute. She boarded a horse-drawn prairie wagon: Halfway up, the driver switched out the horses for more surefooted mules.

Related: These beautiful places are what really make America great. You can hear the echoes of Whitman in Bates. Countries are in our blood and we bleed them. It does not. And her America was similar to this America in more ways, too: It was wondrous and cruel, rich and poor, merciless and merciful, beautiful and ugly. Quite what Bates meant, in each line of the poem, is worth pondering, because the poem is a window to another America, and also, in its way, a mirror to our own.

Katharine Lee Bates inherited, as every American does, a struggle for justice. She was born on the seaside, in Falmouth, Massachusetts , spitting distance from the ocean, in the summer of , just weeks before a white-haired self-professed messiah named John Brown and a band of Black abolitionists raided a U. She was the youngest of five children.

Her father was a Congregational minister; her mother, who, astonishingly, for the time, had a college degree, had been a schoolteacher. The Civil War broke out when Katie was still a baby. In , when Katie was nine, her mother gave her a little red notebook.

The 14th Amendment , ratified that year, guaranteed the equal protection of the law, regardless of race, but made no provision for the equality of the sexes. In the pages of her little red notebook, nine-year-old Katie reflected on the political status of women. It might have been that spark that led the Bates family to do something unusual. In , at 26, she became a professor. Two years later, she published her first book of poetry.

May God thy gold refine Till all success be nobleness, And every gain divine! O beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years Thine alabaster cities gleam Undimmed by human tears! God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!