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 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'. 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. 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.
She wrote other poems, but this, her first, endured. 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. Frye, according to Van Buren's 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. According to Van Buren's research, 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. Dear Abby author Abigail Van Buren researched the poem's history and concluded in 1998 that Mary Elizabeth Frye, who was living in Baltimore at the time, had written the poem in 1932. There have been many claimants to the poem's authorship, including attributions to traditional and Native American origins.
0 kommentar(er)
