Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1930

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Popular Poetry versus Academic Poetry

The literary critic and the common reader are often at odds in their preferences, and the question of literary quality perennially nags at poets, critics, and readers. Poet W. S. Merwin quoted his own teacher in “Berryman,” concluding “if you have to be sure, don’t write” (“Berryman,” Line 40). Merwin and Berryman describe academic writing, but popular works define themselves in numbers, a much simpler way to determine effect.

“Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” appeared in The Gypsy, a Midwestern, Depression-era magazine dedicated to popular, mostly sentimental verse. While modernist poets like William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens marked a departure from poetry’s appeal to emotion and revolutionized American poetry, sentimental verse continued to console and uplift American readers. Newspapers printed inspirational and dramatic poems; anthologies with titles like “Best Loved” poems or “Treasuries” of verse spoke to popular appeal rather than academic standards. Designed to excite emotions rather than intellect, the melodramatic work of sentimental poets, especially female poets, holds more value for its readers than it does with critics.

Academic courses in poetry rarely include poetry books with traditionally high sales, like Desiderata or the works of Khalil Gibran. Seminars may one day address such popular poets as Shel Silverstein and Rupi Kaur, but their cultural stature derives from the millions of readers who have enjoyed their work, not from critical acclaim. In rare instances, poets enjoy both popularity and critical respect; Walt Whitman might qualify—but Dr. Seuss still outsells Leaves of Grass.

When the BBC asked its viewers in 1995 to name their favorite poems, “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” emerged as an overwhelming favorite, taking its place alongside T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare. The poem draws on familiar imagery, breaks little new ground, and does not ask the reader to engage on an intellectual level. But its narrative speaks directly to readers in mourning, a role everyone eventually takes on, in the exact voice mourners most want to hear. The poem’s authorship may be in question, but its popularity does not fade.

Graveyard School

While not so somber in message or tone, “Do Not Stand at my Grave and Weep” likely finds some influence from the Graveyard School of poetry, which enjoyed its greatest popularity in the 18th century with poets like Thomas Gray and Robert Blair. The poetry sought to evoke a mood of contemplation and at times gloom. The Graveyard School centered on the idea that death provided a common experience for all classes of humanity, and that in viewing and pondering the ways of nature, all people can remember and be consoled by the life cycle’s consistency. In addition to the shared focus on natural imagery, “Do Not Stand at my Grave and Weep” may also obliquely echo the didacticism of Graveyard poetry; the poem’s injunction, and its implicitly prescribed view of mortality, somewhat resemble the moral or spiritual instruction that often marked Graveyard poetry. Many Graveyard poets held clerical positions and used their verse as a kind of religious instruction.

The Graveyard poets’ emphasis on nature prefigures Romanticism, and the search for beauty and consolation in the bleak and often morbid looks ahead to the Gothic. Precursors to American Romanticism in the 19th century still employed a version of “Graveyard School” imagery and theme. In poems like “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant or “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking” by Walt Whitman, themes of death and rebirth emerge through contemplation of nature and natural imagery. By the beginning of the 20th century, authors like Thomas Hardy and Mark Twain had satirized the style—Hardy in his ironic version “Are You Digging on My Grave” and Twain in the dreadful Emmeline Grangerford, the grim poetess in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Cemetery poetry after the 19th century runs the risk of sounding like a parody of the Graveyard poets.