In 1932, a German woman by the name of Margaret Schwartzkopf, was the guest of Mary Elizabeth Frye, in Baltimore. She was worried about her mother back in Germany, who was ill, but she was unable to go home to see her because of the increasingly dangerous state of affairs in her home country. Schwartzkopf was Jewish, and although Hitler was still several years from putting his "final solution" into practice, the country was still becoming dangerous and threatening for Jewish Germans. When word of her mother's death reached her, Margaret was both riddled with guilt, and bereft, telling Frye that she had never been able to stand at the graveside and shed a tear. Frye began to write a poem for Margaret, intended only to make her feel better; she jotted down the lines that just seemed to come into her head, expressing her own feelings about life and death, on the back of an old brown paper bag. Frye never tried to publish the poem, and wrote other poems too, but this is the most enduring.
Over the years, there have been many claims made to authorship of the poem; the first two lines are some of the best known lines of poetry in history and even those who known nothing about the poem's history, author or even the subsequent lines that follow the opening ones are able to both quote its title and its initial rhyme. It is comforting because it creates a line of communication between those who are lost and those who have been left behind, and in the era in which it was written, just before World War Two came with its horrendous death toll and heavy sense of loss, it spoke to all communities regardless of age, race or political affiliation.
Fast forward to 1998, when the question of authorship was finally answered by Abigail Van Buren, the woman behind the popular "Dear Abby" newspaper advice column. Van Buren was fascinated by the poem and researched its origins diligently. Originally purported to be a traditional poem, or a Native American script, she finally discovered its true authorship, and the poem enjoyed a resurgence with a new generation of people for whom poetry was more a series of quotations and social media memes than an actual literary art form.
Predominantly known in America, the poem reached a more global audience in the late nineteen nineties when the father of a soldier killed in Northern Ireland by a terrorist attack from the I.R.A., who read the poem on BB Radio in remembrance of his son who had left a copy of the poem for his family and friends amongst his personal effects.
The poem has been set to music by a number of modern composers, and is also used frequently in popular culture. It is also carved into the headstone of the late authorMary Norton, who penned "The Borrowers" series of books, as well as "Bedknob ad Broomsticks". It was shared with a television audience in Season 4 of "Desperate Housewives" and again in the final series of the hit detective show "Prime Suspect".
