Advice
Shake those deep and hypnotic
dreams from your hair!...
Let the purple undertones...
become your rain!...
Let ideas color your eyes!
Let the purple mountains
find your Destiny
beyond your sunsets and sunrises!...
Let the breath ink
your Life in an Eternity portrait
where your Heart
relapsed in Time!...
Purple Mountain Majesty -- Jill Pease
Shake those deep and hypnotic
dreams from your hair!...
Let the purple undertones...
become your rain!...
Let ideas color your eyes!
Let the purple mountains
find your Destiny
beyond your sunsets and sunrises!...
Let the breath ink
your Life in an Eternity portrait
where your Heart
relapsed in Time!...
Purple Mountain Majesty -- Jill Pease
O beautiful for spacious skies
ReplyDeleteFor 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!
This is the familiar first verse (of eight, usually ignored) of “America” by Wellesley College professor Katharine Lee Bates, who wrote the first draft while teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado, during the summer of 1893. It was inspired by a visit to Pikes Peak, the highest summit of the southern Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, one of the state’s 53 “fourteeners.” As she later remarked, “All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.” It was published in “The Congregationalist,” a weekly journal, for Independence Day, 1895, and then, in revised form, in the “Boston Evening Transcript” in 1904. A version appeared in her collection “America the Beautiful, and Other Poems” (1912) and her final, expanded, form was written in 1913. It had already been joined to Samuel A. Ward’s 1882 tune "Materna," which he intended as a setting for the hymn "O Mother Dear, Jerusalem" (published in 1892); a published combined the poem and the music in 1910 as “America the Beautiful.” Bates lived for a quarter century with Katharine Coman, dean of Wellesley College, in what was known as a “Boston marriage.” (The term was associated with Henry James's 1886 novel “The Bostonians” about a long-term co-habiting relationship between two unmarried women, although James himself never used the term; his sister Alice lived in such a relationship; as for James, president Theodore Roosevelt referred to him as “the undersized man of letters, who flees his country because he, with his delicate, effeminate sensitiveness, finds the conditions of life on this side of the water crude and raw.”)