Lyrics
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 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.
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.
Public domain hymn text and tune (text 1893, revised 1904; tune 1892). Words by Katharine Lee Bates; music by Samuel A. Ward.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Katharine Lee Bates, a professor of English literature at Wellesley College, wrote the poem that became "America the Beautiful" after a trip to Colorado in the summer of 1893. Bates had traveled west to lecture at Colorado College, and on July 22 she joined a group riding wagons and mules to the summit of Pikes Peak. She later described being overwhelmed by the view from the top, writing that "all the wonder of America seemed displayed" before her, spread out like a sea.
She wrote the poem soon after descending, and it was first published two years later, on July 4, 1895, in a weekly journal called The Congregationalist. Within months, publishers and composers were setting it to various melodies; the tune that eventually stuck, MATERNA, had actually been composed the year before Bates's trip, in 1892, by Samuel A. Ward for an entirely different hymn, "O Mother Dear, Jerusalem." Bates revised her own text in 1904, in response to the growing number of requests to use it in publications and church services.
Unlike more triumphant patriotic hymns of the era, Bates's text repeatedly asks God to refine, mend, and confirm the nation rather than simply to bless it — "God mend thine every flaw" sits alongside the hymn's more celebrated images of grain and mountains and shining seas.
Though never formally adopted as a national anthem, "America the Beautiful" has remained, for many, the hymn most associated with the American landscape itself — a poem that began, quite literally, with one professor catching her breath at 14,000 feet.
