6. The Professor-Poet Katharine Lee Bates

Katharine Lee Bates, who lived from 1859 to 1929, was first a student and later a professor of English literature at Wellesley. The famous women’s college in Massachusetts had been founded in 1870, not even a decade before she matriculated. Independent of her activities there as a teacher and scholar, she was the author of poetry, novels, children’s literature, and more.

Today Bates is remembered mostly for the lyrics of “America the Beautiful.” Her words came to be paired with the melody only more than a decade after she originally composed the poem. Thereby hangs a tale. In 1893, the poet wrote down a first, partial draft of the words in her elation at the vista she saw upon reaching the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado. The year has a strong bearing on her patriotic epiphany, since it witnessed the opening of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Illinois. This extravaganza marked the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Also called the Columbian Exposition, the exhibition was accompanied by much patriotic fervor throughout the US, including the release of commemorative postage stamps and coins. Two years later, a first version of the poem was printed in 1895 under the one-word title “America,” in the Independence Day issue of a Boston-based church weekly. It was set to music repeatedly. In 1904, the text of her piece was matched with a melody entitled “Materna” that Samuel A. Ward (whom she never met and who died in 1903) composed as the setting for a seventeenth-century poem, “O Mother dear, Jerusalem.” The two compositions dovetailed perfectly: both were in what is called common meter double. The combination of her words and his music resulted in a hymn that won the status of the anthem we still know today. Her final revisions are found in the form she published in 1911.

Despite the undeniably powerful name-recognition that “America the Beautiful” retains in the United States, it would be unfair to present Bates as nothing more than a one-hit wonder. After receiving her undergraduate degree in 1880, she taught high school before pursuing advanced studies. In 1891, she earned a master’s degree from her alma mater and began teaching in the English department there. In the first two decades of her career, she worked extensively with medieval literature, not just as a teacher and researcher but also as a poet and even as a children’s book author.

Fig. 35: Katharine Lee Bates. Photograph, early twentieth century. Photographer unknown. Wellesley, MA, Archives of Wellesley College. Image courtesy of Wellesley College. All rights reserved.

Committed to maintaining what might be called her creative side and beyond it her wholeness as a woman, she once wrote: “My heart isn’t quite pressed flat in a Middle English dictionary.” Over the past few decades one aspect of her interior life that has elicited considerable attention relates to her fellow Wellesley professor, housemate, intimate friend, and perhaps even more, Katherine Coman. The failed courtships of Bates by at least two men have also been the object of fascination. Could any of these emotional entanglements have informed moments in the poem that she made out of our story?

At an intersection between her scholarship and her poetry, Bates wrote a verse adaptation entitled “Our Lady’s Tumbler.” She published this poem first in 1904 and a few times afterward. It totals fifty-four lines, in nine six-line stanzas (sixains or sextains) of iambic pentameter that are uniformly rhymed ababab. The form resembles the Sicilian sestet. Anything but a verbatim translation of the thirteenth-century French poem, these 428 words reduce the cast of characters to the tumbler and the object of his devotion, Our Lady. Though the dancer is a convert in a monastery, his fellow monks and the abbot or prior are omitted from the picture.

In “Our Lady’s Tumbler” Bates’s bent as a professional medievalist shows strongly in two ways. One is that her poem opens bookishly, by conjuring up the brittleness of the manuscript folio on which the text of the medieval legend was supposedly transmitted. The other is her diction. Some terms relate to religious practices and customs that were entrenched within Christianity many centuries ago, often as maintained in Roman Catholicism even long after the Middle Ages. But other words are archaisms and obsolete English that are meant to evoke the society and speech of “ye olde” days when the dramatic action of the piece purportedly occurred. These choices in diction hold true to a style that was once commonly used in writing about olden times. This pseudo-medieval tic owed much to Sir Walter Scott, whose choice of vocabulary in his fiction about the Middle Ages exerted an irresistible influence on many later authors for more than a century. Bates herself had visited numerous sites in the British Isles that were associated with the novelist and his oeuvre. Her mannerism, including the archaizing lexicon, was encouraged more generally by the medieval revival. The movement made a medieval-esque style in architecture, decorative arts, and literature popular throughout the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“Our Lady’s Tumbler”