Purple mountains and alabaster cities
09/02/15 05:14
When we were living in Chicago, friends from other parts of the United States would occasionally tease me about my home state’s motto: “Big Sky Country.” The would say, how can the sky be big or little? It is just the sky. I would try to describe how the air and sky felt different when I was home in Montana from the way it felt in Chicago. My words simply didn’t convey any of the sense of Montana to them. I ended up saying, “The only way for you to know that that slogan means is for you to come to Montana.” Some of my friends did. They get it. The sky does seem bigger when the air is clear and you are in a place whether there are few buildings and you can see horizon to horizon.
I’m pretty sure that when our chorus teacher, Mr. Nelson, had us memorize all of the verses to “America the Beautiful,” his reason had to do with musicality and the need of choir members to look at their director when singing so that the ensemble sang together. I doubt that he even knew the story of the poem, which was first published in “The Congregationalist,” a publication of my church, in 1895. The words were slightly revised in subsequent versions, but the poem remained essentially the same.
It is likely that the church, though not the Congregational church, had something to do with the choice of the tune for Katharine Lee Bates. Samuel A. Ward, credited with composing the tune was organist and choirmaster at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey. The tune, however, soon became popular among Congregationalists. The missionaries used that tune for the school song at the University of Shanghai.
I was thinking about Bates’ poem last weekend because I was in Colorado. We didn’t got up into the mountains, but if you make it to the top of Pikes Peak, either by the cog wheel railroad or the rather steep gravel road, or hiking the Barr Trail, you will see a plaque with the words to the poem on it.
The story, as best as I know it is that Bates, who was an English professor at Wellesley College, took a train trip west to teach the summer session at Colorado College. On her way to Colorado, she stopped over at the Columbian Exposition, the World’s Fair being held in Chicago. Chicago was a place of great construction and architecture already, with the huge job of rebuilding after the great Chicago fire. The occasion of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the North American continent, was an occasion to invite the world to Chicago. Great architects such as Daniel Burnahm, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Louis Sullivan designed buildings in the neoclassical style. Funded, in part by huge investments from wealth business leaders of the time, such as J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt and William Waldorf Astor, the magnificent white buildings were lighted by electricity and an amazing sight for the time.
From Chicago the train took Bates to St. Louis, Kansas City, and across the plains of Kansas to Denver. By the time she got to Colorado, she had seen a lot. The story is that she wrote the poem after making it to the top of Pikes Peak.
So the first verse of the poem makes sense, knowing the trip Bates had taken:
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!
Having grown up on the eastern slope of the Rockies, I thought that “purple mountains” was a bit of poetic license, since Bates made her trip in the summer and purple is really a winter color in the mountains, but I could pretty much understand the rest, especially amber waves of grain. I knew how a wheat field looked when it was ready for harvest. OK, there is very little fruit grown in the part of the world that Bates traveled, but you have to allow for a bit of poetic licenses and “fruited” is way better than the original version which called it an “enameled” plain, whatever that meant.
The middle two verses might take a particular perspective on history, but then, so did the Columbian Exposition. The roles of indigenous people weren’t exactly celebrated in either event. The times were different in those days and we still had much to learn about the full history of this land. Still, I grew up Congregationalist. I got the bit about stern impassioned stress and the call to self-control.
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!
We were the children of the World War II generation and we had heard, from our earliest days about sacrifice and putting others ahead of one’s own health or safety. And, as an adult, I have become grateful to Mr. Nelson for having us memorize the words. There have been many times when the need for mercy and continual refinement of the vision have been apparent.
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!
But when you memorize, you push for the home stretch - the fourth verse:
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
Somehow, I knew that the alabaster city was Chicago. I had visited Chicago once, when I was six years old. I remembered the elevated trains and Buckingham fountain, but little else. So when I moved to Chicago, I was expecting to see some of that Alabaster. Of course the buildings of the Columbian Exposition weren’t really alabaster. They were marble. And by the time I arrived, those that remained, such as the Museum of Science and Industry and the relocated Field Museum, were no longer white at all. They were soot stained and gray.
Still, it is a great poem. One worthy of remembering. Like other great poems, it probably exaggerates a bit. It makes a pretty good song. These days when I sing it, I remember high school choir, but I can also hear Ray Charles’ version as well. That’s probably a good thing.