Ohio-born Mary Elizabeth Frye wasn't much of a poet. In fact, prior to setting pen to brown paper on a shopping bag one day in 1932, in Baltimore, the florist said she had never written a poem.
Despite this, the words she scribbled down—a set of impassioned lines allegedly inspired by a German-Jewish friend who couldn’t travel back to Germany to see her gravely ill mother, due to the rise in antisemitism—soon took on a life of their own. After sharing the poem with several peers, it then circulated anonymously far and wide. Over the decades it was read at Hollywood directors’ funerals, appeared in BBC broadcasts, and was even carved into a stone at the Everest Memorial. Now, if you Google “funeral poem” you’ll likely find Frye’s “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” among the top results.
The poem’s appeal lies primarily in its simplicity. Its premise—one of death as transformation, or rather transmutation—offers immediate solace. In several rhyming couplets the speaker implores those grieving the absence of a loved one to instead recognise their continued presence in the natural world: “I am the sunlight on ripened grain/ I am the gentle autumn rain.” The physical body is gone, it reassures, but death isn’t actually the end: “I did not die.”
However, although its present popularity is undoubted, its attribution is still up for discussion. Nice as Frye’s poetic origin story might be, she wasn’t actually claimed as the author for more than 50 years. There are clashing accounts of who got there first, but the most widely cited source is popular American advice column “Dear Abby,” who apparently named her in 1998. However, definitive proof of her authorship is still lacking.
In fact, dive into the poem’s history and things quickly get contentious. There are whole blogs devoted to the subject. Several other names come up, notably the Kansas poet Clare Harner Lyon, as well as references to earlier versions carved on gravestones or circulated among indigenous Native American communities. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the commonality of its themes and imagery.
Such murky origins seem rather fitting for a funeral poem. Although many major poets are invoked at times of mourning and remembrance, a notable number are also little-known or anonymous—spreading via word of mouth, or disseminated through anthologies and online directories.
At the last funeral I went to, one of the poems read aloud had been a wry piece about old age found handwritten among the family member’s possessions. The key line reads “my ‘get-up-and-go’ just got up and went.” This line can be found in multiple poems and song lyrics scattered across the internet, each tweaked in length and language choice. Unlike poems that have been studied as examples of great literary merit, more straightforwardly humorous or sentimental verse offers a certain capaciousness: renewing and changing itself according to the needs of the occasion.
Not that other sorts of poems are immune from these kinds of transformations in purpose, necessarily. Context can shift as well as language. WH Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” which made a famous (and tear-jerking) appearance in Four Weddings and a Funeral, began life in a 1936 play called The Ascent ofF6, co-authored with Christopher Isherwood. It was intended to be sung as a sort of satire on the garishly excessive sentiment of state funerals. These days it still remains popular as an expression of abject, all-consuming grief.
We read poetry for many reasons, including pleasure, revelation, and intellectual challenge, but poems have always had a specifically social function too, especially when it comes to rites like weddings and funerals. There is an unusual brevity and complexity to the poem—and an emotional charge, too. Talk to anyone about memorable poems heard or read at funerals and they’re likely to have a story of one that’s stuck with them: whether it was Wendy Cope’s no-nonsense “My Funeral,” Raymond Carver’s strikingly compact “Late Fragment,” or the apt joy of Gerard Manley-Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty.”
This peculiar power is one recognised, too, by those who work in the funeral industry. “Because the form is so varied, it can allude in a way that prose doesn’t [and] can be multiply interpreted by different people,” says Sian Allen, a funeral celebrant working across Shropshire and Powys. “It can set the scene, it can tell the story of a place or an emotion, it can comfort, it can give thanks, it can acknowledge someone… I think sometimes it expresses something for a family that they don’t have the words for.”
Although some families choose their own poem, Allen also has multiple files of poems she keeps on hand as suggestions. Some are themed around particular hobbies—fishing, trains, bingo, hiking—while others allude to relationships (ones on mothers are popular). Many come from big names—Shakespeare, Mary Oliver, Lord Alfred Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”—but plenty more do not.
John Donaghue’s “Time to Be Slow” has been especially useful this past year, as people have had to navigate the double grief of loss and vastly altered funeral conditions in light of the pandemic. Throughout these poems certain repeat images emerge—journeying, consolation, presence and absence, unknowable immensity, the sheer, glorious experience of having lived—but each provides something singular, too.
The relationship between funerals and poetry is perhaps striking because it brings into focus that most difficult of questions: What does poetry give us? Or maybe, even more broadly, what is it for? This is an almost impossibly unwieldy question, but perhaps easier to grapple with in a funereal context.
After all, when read aloud for a congregation gathered together or, now, watching over Zoom, a poem does not stand on its own but in conversation with the person being commemorated and those they have left behind. It has purpose. It allows for a range of feelings and experiences—catharsis, grief, identification, shared memory—and can offer a range of meanings. As simplistic as “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” might be, it is perhaps a fitting illustration of that interpretive act. A poem can be a method of turning absence into presence. Here, it is what you choose to make it.
