3/30/2023 0 Comments O beautiful for spacious skies![]() ![]() ![]() Its use can vary from an emphasis on country, as in the handbell medley “Freedom Rings” (which includes MATERNA, AMERICA, and BATTLE HYMN) or an emphasis on God, as in a “Litany for America,” in which the hymn is interspersed with readings and prayers. This patriotic hymn is best suited for Memorial Day or Independence Day. This pairing became very popular during World War I, and has remained well-known ever since. Whichever is the case, it was not published until 1888 in The Parish Choir. Accounts vary on whether he wrote it on his shirt cuff while crossing New York Harbor in 1882, or whether he wrote it in memory of his daughter in 1885. MATERNA, composed by Samuel Ward, is Latin for “motherly” It derives its name from the hymn “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem,” for which it was originally written. However, the second half is always used, replacing the second half of the third or fourth stanzas it is a beautiful prayer. Bates's original four stanzas are usually printed intact, but the first half of the second (“O beautiful for pilgrim feet”) is omitted in some hymnals because it seems to celebrate the way the white European settlers treated the Native Americans as they took over the American continent. The first half of each stanza expounds on the beauty of some aspect of America, while the second half of each stanza is a prayer for God's blessing on the country. Bates revised her text substantially over the years, and its final form appeared in her history of the hymn for the Boston Athenaeum library in 1918. Two years later, the text was published in The Congregationalist. Before she boarded the train east, she had written the four stanzas of this hymn, incorporating the images of America that had made an impression on her during her trip. At the end of the summer class, Bates and some Eastern colleagues rode to the top of Pikes Peak, where, as she later wrote, “It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind” (as quoted in Companion to the United Methodist Hymnal, Carlton R. The train took her through the vast Kansas wheat fields, which were a new sight to her New England eyes, accustomed as they were to hills and close horizons. Her destination was Colorado Springs, where she was going to teach a summer class, but she stopped along the way at the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago, where the “White City” exhibition made a deep impression on her. While Bates was initially surprised by the poem’s success, she later reflected that its enduring "hold as it has upon our people, is clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood.In 1893 Katharine Lee Bates, an English professor from Massachusetts, took a trip west. in manuals of hymns and prayers, and anthologies of patriotic prose and poetry. in a large number of regularly published song books, poetry readers, civic readers, patriotic readers. Within twenty years, Bates (after revising some of the lyrics in 1904) had "given hundreds, perhaps thousands, of free permissions" for "America the Beautiful" to appear "in church hymnals and Sunday School song books of nearly all the denominations. Celebrating "country loved" and the "patriot dream," the song resonated with Americans from all walks of life and became enormously popular. ![]() Ward’s "Materna," the tune to which we sing it today. Bates’s patriotic words were soon set to music, most popularly to composer S. The poem was first printed in a weekly newspaper, The Congregationalist, on July 4, 1895. under those ample skies," and "the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind." Those opening lines-"O beautiful for spacious skies, / For amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!"-would eventually become the lyrics of one of the best-known songs in American history.īates finished writing "America the Beautiful" before leaving Colorado Springs but didn’t think of publishing it until two years later. At the top, Bates later wrote, she was inspired by "the sea-like expanse of fertile country. Bates and the other professors decided to "celebrate the close of the session by a merry expedition to the top of Pike’s Peak." They made the ascent by prairie wagon. Bates was a professor at Wellesley and had traveled west to teach a summer course in Colorado Springs. 1925, poet Katharine Lee Bates described her inspiration for writing "America the Beautiful," the poem that would evolve into one of the nation’s best-loved patriotic songs, during a trip to Pike’s Peak in 1893.
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