
It is also reproduced on the gravestone of the actor Charles Bronson. Reference to the wind and snow and the general theme of the poem, the absence of the departed, particularly resonate with the loved ones of those who "disappeared" in the mountain range to whom the memorial is dedicated. The poem's first four lines are engraved on one of the stones of the Everest Memorial, Chukpi Lhara, in Dhugla Valley, near Everest. The soldier's father read the poem on BBC radio in 1995 in remembrance of his son, who had left the poem among his personal effects in an envelope addressed 'To all my loved ones'. A common reading at funerals and remembrance ceremonies, the poem was introduced to many in the United Kingdom when it was read by the father of a soldier killed by a bomb in Northern Ireland. After hearing John Wayne's reading, script writer John Carpenter featured the poem in the 1979 television film Better Late Than Never. John Wayne read the poem "from an unspecified source" on Decemat the memorial service for film director Howard Hawks. Her obituary in The Times asserted her claim to authorship of the famous poem, which has been recited at funerals and on other appropriate occasions around the world for 60 years. Later she said that the words "just came to her" and expressed what she felt about life and death.Īccording to her account, Frye circulated the poem privately, never publishing it. Frye, according to Van Buren's supposed research, found herself composing a piece of verse on a brown paper shopping bag. 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". Margaret Schwarzkopf was concerned about her mother, who was ill in Germany, but she had been warned not to return home because of increasing unrest. As late as 2004, Jeanne Phillips acknowledged, "I regret that I have never been able to confirm the author." Supposedly Frye had never written any poetry, but the plight of a German Jewish woman, Margaret Schwarzkopf, who was staying with her and her husband, had inspired the poem. In print, however, Dear Abby columns by Pauline Phillips and her daughter Jeanne consistently treated authorship of the poem as an unsolved mystery. Frye," Dear Abby author "Abigail Van Buren" researched the poem's history and concluded in 1998 that Ohio native Mary Elizabeth Frye (Novem– September 15, 2004), a self-employed florist and amateur poet, who was living in Baltimore at the time, had written the poem in 1932. According to the London Times obituary for the "Baltimore housewife Mary E. Shull first publicized the claim for Mary Elizabeth Frye's authorship in a newspaper column for the Indianapolis News on 9 June 1983. In 1981, newspaper columnist Bettelou Peterson identified the author for enquiring readers as "the late Clara Harner Lyon, of California." Later many other claimants to the poem's authorship emerged, including attributions to traditional and Native American origins.
DO NOT STAND AT MY GRAVE AND WEEP FORM POEM MOVIE
Interest surged after the poem was read as a graveside eulogy by actor Harold Gould in the 1979 NBC TV movie Better Late Than Never. Kansas native Clare Harner's original poem "Immortality" was reprinted from The Gypsy in the Kansas City Times on 8 February 1935. Each line is in iambic tetrameter, except for lines five and seven, the fifth having an extra syllable, the seventh, two extra. The poem is twelve lines long, rhyming in couplets.

Differing words are shown in it by italics. Other versions of the poem appeared later, usually without attribution, such as the one below. Original versionīelow is the version published in The Gypsy of December 1934 (page 16), under the title "Immortality" and followed by the author's name and location: "CLARE HARNER, Topeka, Kan." The indentation and line breaks are as given there. However, the Oxford journal " Notes and Queries" published a 2018 article claiming the poem, originally titled " Immortality", was in fact written by Clare Harner Lyon (1909-1977) and first published under her maiden name (Harner) in the December 1934 issue of The Gypsy poetry magazine. This was purportedly confirmed in 1998 research conducted for the newspaper column "Dear Abby" ( Pauline Phillips).

During the late 1990s, Mary Elizabeth Frye claimed to have written the poem in 1932. The poem was popularized during the late 1970s thanks to a reading by John Wayne that inspired further readings on television.

" Do not stand at my grave and weep" is the first line and popular title of a bereavement poem of disputed authorship. Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep explained
