For all the contentiousness in our present political spheres, a remembrance of what we Americans became and united over…molded by a rugged, beautiful landscape – it needs reminding.
America the Beautiful-patriotic song
Opening stanza from America the Beautiful (Bates 1895 and Ward 1883): “Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain!”
Walt Whitman thoughts
Whitman penned the connection of nature with our democracy in Specimen Days.
Democracy most of all affiliates with the open air, is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature-just as much as Art is. Something is required to temper both-to check them, restrain them from excess, morbidity. I have wanted, before departure, to bear special testimony to a very old lesson and prerequisite. American Democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices-through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life–must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will morbidly dwindle and pale. We cannot have grand races of mechanics, work people, and commonalty, (the only specific purpose of America,) on any less terms. I conceive of no flourishing and heroic elements of Democracy in the United States, of Democracy maintaining itself at all, without the Nature-element forming a main part–to be its health-element and beauty-element–to really underlie the whole politics, sanity, religion and art of the New World.”
Specimen Days and Collect -Walt Whitman – originally published by Reed Welsh & Co., Philadelphia, 1882. Reprint: Copyright Melville House 2014 with introduction by Leslie Jamison.
Thanks for your consideration and attention 🙂
