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 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 had been concerned about her mother, who was ill in Germany, but she had been warned not to return home because of increasing anti-Semitic unrest. She had never written any poetry, but the plight of a young German Jewish woman, Margaret Schwarzkopf, who was staying with her and her husband, inspired the poem. Frye, who was living in Baltimore at the time, wrote the poem in 1932. “ Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” is a poem written in 1932 by Mary Elizabeth Frye.
