Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep=Funeral Poem

The history of this famous grief poem is below, after the poem.  This was the poet's very first poem.  Mary Frye wrote it on a brown paper bag in 1932, and nobody knew who wrote it until 1998.  It has been recited at funerals around the world for 80 years:

The "definitive version," as published by The Times and The Sunday Times in Frye's obituary, 5 November 2004:^[2]

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow,

I am the sun on ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circling flight.

I am the soft star-shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there; I did not die.

[edit]Origins

Mary Frye, who was living in Baltimore at the time, wrote the poem in 1932. She had never written any poetry, but the plight of a young German Jewish woman, Margaret Schwarzkopf, who was staying with her and her husband, inspired the poem. She wrote it down on a brown paper shopping bag. Margaret Schwarzkopf had been concerned about her mother, who was ill in Germany, but she had been warned not to return home because of increasing anti-Semitic unrest. When her mother died, the heartbroken young woman told Frye that she never had the chance to “stand by my mother’s grave and shed a tear”. Frye found herself composing a piece of verse on a brown paper shopping bag. Later she said that the words “just came to her” and expressed what she felt about life and death.^[1] Mary Frye circulated the poem privately. Because she never published or copyrighted it, there is no definitive version. She wrote other poems, but this, her first, endured. Her obituary in The Times made it clear that she was the author of the famous poem, which has been recited at funerals and on other appropriate occasions around the world for eighty years.^[3]

The poem was introduced to many in Britain when it was read by the father of a soldier killed by a bomb in Northern Ireland. The soldier's father read the poem on BBC radio in 1995 in remembrance of his son, having been left it in an envelope addressed 'To all my loved ones' in his personal effects. The authorship of the poem was established a few years later after an investigation by journalist Abigail Van Buren. There is a short illustrated book of the poem sometimes to be found in small-town bookshops with ink drawings for each line that includes this story in the inside dustjacket, written before the authorship was confirmed and therefore stating that the authorship is unknown.

(Thanks to Wikipedia.)