A Summary and Analysis of ‘Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’ – or, more accurately, ‘Do not stand by my grave and weep’ – are the opening words of a much-loved poem whose official title is ‘Immortality’. The poem was written by the American poet Clare Harner (1909-77) and published in The Gypsy magazine in December 1934. (We’ll return to the matter of the poem’s authorship towards the end of this article.)

The poem offers a message of hope and reassurance to someone who has lost a dear loved one, with the speaker of the poem telling the reader that, through dying, the speaker has become a part of the whole world around us.

Summary

Although it has the official title ‘Immortality’, the poem is commonly known by its first line, ‘do not stand at my grave and weep’. The speaker is someone who has passed away. This speaker tells the reader not to mourn over their grave because they have died. ‘They’ are not really there, because, having died, they are not ‘asleep’ in their grave.

But nor are they gone completely: instead, the speaker tells the reader that they are now everywhere, a part of all of nature: they are in the winds that blow, the sharp bright glints of ice in the snow, and the sunlight that shines on ripened grain in wheat-fields. They are even in the rain that falls in the autumn.

When the reader awakens in the morning, they should be able to ‘hear’ the dead speaker of the poem in the flight of birds in the sky. The speaker is a ‘day’ which overcomes and vanquishes the night: a light in the darkness, a soft, gentle sound in the ‘hush’ of the morning.

The speaker ends the poem by enjoining the reader again not to stand over their grave and cry with grief. There is no reason to cry, because the speaker didn’t really ‘die’ at all: instead, they have become part of the living world around us.

Analysis

‘Immortality’ or, if you will, ‘Do Not Stand at my Grave and Weep’ imparts a message of comfort to the reader, telling the reader not to mourn at the dead person’s graveside because they are not physically present there. Instead, the speaker says they have become one with nature, existing in the wind, sunlight, rain, and the beauty of the world around them. They urge the reader to find them in these elements and to move on with their lives, celebrating the joy and beauty of existence.

Of course, even if we don’t fully accept such a pantheistic vision of life after death – a philosophy bordering on a pseudo-Buddhist notion of reincarnation – the poem’s message is still powerful as a metaphorical one. After all, we can ‘detect’ the memory of a dead loved one in the sounds of nature around us, because they remind us in some way of the person we knew. We don’t have to buy wholesale any literal idea of a person’s ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ being scattered to the four corners of the earth and becoming a physical part of everything (including the sunlight).

Themes

The central theme of the poem is, we might say, the impermanence of physical life and the continuation of the spirit in nature. Death is not seen as an ending, but a transformation into something larger and more enduring. Whether we take this transformation as literal or metaphorical will depend on our own individual worldview and belief system, but the poem ‘works’ on both levels.

Imagery

The poem uses vivid natural imagery to convey the speaker’s connection with the world. We see references to wind, snow, sunlight, rain, birds, and the morning sky. This imagery creates a sense of peace and connection, suggesting that the speaker is not gone but has simply become part of something bigger.

The focus is on quiet, gentleness, calm: the birds are ‘quiet’ in the morning sky, the autumn rain is ‘gentle’, and the image of sunlight on ripened grain suggests warmth and peace. Such images serve to suggest that the speaker is now themselves at peace, after leaving their physical human form behind.

These images are offered in a comforting and reassuring tone. The speaker speaks directly to the reader, offering solace and urging them to find peace. There is a sense of acceptance and celebration of life, even in the face of death.

Form

The form of the poem is a matter of contention, since it has often been rendered in rhyming couplets. However, when the poem first appeared in print, it was structured quite differently (see here). So, if we focus on the original printing of the poem when it was rightly attributed to its true author (more on the authorship issue in a moment), the poem is arranged into sixteen short lines of varying lengths.

These sixteen lines are presented as a single unit or stanza, but in order to detect the poem’s underlying structure, we can view it as being split into three sections: a quatrain or four-line stanza which begins and ends the poem, rhymed abcb, where the concluding quatrain closely follows the wording of the opening quatrain; and a middle eight-line section in rhyming couplets.

If we want to be really technical, we can talk about the metre, or rhythm, of the poem. These four rhyming couplets which form the poem’s central eight-line section are almost all in a metre known as iambic tetrameter, but with a reversed foot (a trochee) at the beginning of each line: so ‘I am the THOU-sand WINDS that BLOW’ (however, even that initial ‘I am’ could alternatively be scanned as iambic, depending on whether we want to give emphasis to the  ‘I’ or the ‘am’): ‘I am’ can be heard as ‘I AM’, or literally as an iamb, as it were).

Authorship

The poem’s authorship has been a subject of considerable confusion over the ninety-odd years since the poem first appeared in print. The most thorough account of the authorship confusion (we can hardly call it a ‘question’ since there is no doubt as to who the true author was) is that by Scott Norsworthy published in Notes and Queries in 2018.

The important fact, though, is that the poem was first published in The Gypsy, a poetry magazine published in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the December 1934 issue (on page sixteen). The author was given as Clare Harner, of Topeka, Kansas. The poem survived in certain corners of the popular memory until 1977, when the film star John Wayne reportedly read it at the memorial service for Howard Hawks, and interest in the poem was well and truly rekindled.

The misattribution of the poem to Mary Elizabeth Frye (1905-2004) dates from 1983, and persisted until Norsworthy finally laid the matter to rest a quarter of a century later. In spite of this, many online sources continue to name the poem’s author – incorrectly – as Frye rather than Harner.

And although the poem is often known as ‘do not stand at my grave and weep’, when the poem was first published in 1934 as ‘Immortality’, it began with the words ‘Do not stand / By my grave, and weep’.