Frye, according to Van Buren's research, 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.įrye circulated the poem privately, never publishing or copyrighting it. She wrote other poems, but this, her first, endured. Her obituary in The Times stated that she was the author of the famous poem, which has been recited at funerals and on other appropriate occasions around the world for 60 years. 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. 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'. To coincide with National Poetry Day 1995, the British television programme The Bookworm conducted a poll to discover the nation's favourite poems, and subsequently published the winning poems in book form.
The book's preface stated that 'Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep' was 'the unexpected poetry success of the year from Bookworm's point of view' the poem had 'provoked an extraordinary response. The requests started coming in almost immediately and over the following weeks the demand rose to a total of some thirty thousand.
