20 pages • 40 minutes read
Katharine Lee BatesAmerica the Beautiful
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1893A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Sea
While the iconic line “from sea to shining sea” was not in the original draft of the song, it has become an important aspect of the song’s imagery and legacy. In fact, the line embodies the entire song’s message and thematic concerns.
To understand this, it’s important to understand how the oceans relate to American mythology and the history of the country. America is unique in modern times because it took a perilous journey across a great ocean just to reach it. Only the bravest or most desperate would make that journey, and it quickly became a symbolic one as people left the old world, crossed a great threshold, and arrived in a virgin (to them) land. Thus, the Atlantic became symbolic as a divide between old and new.
However, as the country progressed and people expanded westward, the Pacific Ocean became the new oceanic symbol in America. The Pacific’s shining waters represented a goal for the country, and that goal was Manifest Destiny, or the idea that the West belonged to America and that it was God’s will for Americans to expand until they reached the golden coast. In this sense, the Pacific Ocean represented progress and evolution.
Put together, these two bodies of water represent where America came from and where America is going. By bookending the song with this image of past and future, Bates shows the scale of America’s legacy and ambition while also drawing on the physical reality that the country is one giant land mass surrounded by water, suggesting that what lies between those waters is one connected entity.
God and Nature
While this guide has already covered the song’s use of nature and the divine, it is important to note that the purpose of these two symbols is to connect America as a country to bigger concepts. The association between America and the natural world gives the country more moral weight. Bates uses the natural and the divine to connect America to something bigger than itself and something that is supposed to represent goodness. God is the protector of America, and the natural world is a physical representation of the country’s values. By invoking these two symbols, Bates is mythologizing the country as something greater than itself.
Man and Cities
In this song, man is the servant of God and nature, but man creates his own wonders and beauty. Most notably, man builds alabaster cities with the potential to stand tall even in the face of tears. Similar to how the natural world produces gold and amber, man produces brilliant light with his electric cities.
One thing a modern reader might want to consider here is how this imagery might have changed over the past 100 years. In Bates’s time, nature still dominated the manmade world in America. Towns were spaced out and connected sometimes only by rail. There were no cars or highways, and most cities didn’t have full electrical power. People were still intimately connected with the land. But in the modern world, mankind’s excesses have come to dominate the natural world, leading to potential ruin. A modern reader might ask themself how an updated 21st century version of “America the Beautiful” might be changed to better represent the relationship humans currently have with the natural world.
