Page 6 - Introducing The Gratitudes

6 ■ The Poetic Power of
clarity of metaphors, and there is the intensity of death.”
There have been many claimants to the poem’s authorship, including attribu- tions to traditional and Native American origins. Dear Abby author Abigail Van Buren researched the poem’s history in 1998 and concluded that Mary Elizabeth Frye young of Baltimore had written the poem in 1932. Frye had never written any poetry, but the plight of a German Jewish woman, Margaret Schwarzkopf, who was staying with her, had inspired the poem. Concerned about her mother, who was ill in Germany, Schwarzkopf had been warned not to return home because of increasing 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.
Frye circulated the poem privately, never publishing or copyrighting it. She wrote other poems, but this, her first, endured. It has been recited at funerals and on other appropriate occasions around the world for 60 years.
But the poem she wrote and circulated is not the poem we have come to know today. Several of the lines have been changed, and improved in the changes. It is now virtually impossible to trace by whom and when the changes were made, but they have made the poem the powerful avatar is has become. Perhaps, after all, there was a talented Native American who introduced lines like “I am the diamond glints on snow” and “when you awake in the morning’s hush / I am the swift uplifting rush / of quiet birds in circled flight” that are so wonderfully evocative and enthralling.
Some poems burn their way into the collective consciousness and lift us up in times of loss and grieving. This is surely one such.
INTRODUCING
THE GRATITUDES
Field Guides to
Learning and Living Everyday EVavleureysday Values
Bricolage
The Canadian author Edward Chamberlin, in his brilliant 2003 book If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground references an anonymous poem, saying:
“It is often said that nobody pays atten- tion to anything as unpractical – as dreamy – as poetry any more. I’m not so sure. During the Cultural Revolution, poems were plastered on walls and notice boards everywhere in China, expressions
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.
of belief in the power of words to make things happen. And in Poland, during the Solidarity uprising, the fences around the Gdansk shipyard were covered in poetry. A few years ago, during a program on war poetry, the BBC broadcast a poem titled “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep”. Its author is unknown, but it had been written down by a soldier in Northern Ireland and left in an envelope for his
parents in case he was killed. Within week, the BBC received thirty thousand requests for copies. This is the poem, a catalogue of metaphors that stand testimony both to the moving power of poetry and to the ability of listeners and readers to embrace its contradictions and surrender to its charms.
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.
Every time I read this poem I cry, for it brings back very personal memories of loss. It also helps me in ways I cannot explain. There is mystery here, in a