Winifred Emma May Biography
Winifred Emma May (4 June 1907 – 28 August 1990) was a poet from the United Kingdom, best known for her work under the pen name Patience Strong. Her poems were usually short, simple and imbued with sentimentality, the beauty of nature and inner strength. She was also a successful lyricist, composing English words for the tango 'Jealousy' and 'The Dream of Olwen' and an author of several books dealing with Christianity and practical psychology.
In 1935 she asked The Daily Mirror for a regular publication of her poems. The features editor asked her to return the following day with eighteen new poems and a suggested pseudonym. This she did with the pseudonym of Patience Strong, a name she took from a book of the same name by Adeline T. Whitney (born 1870). Her daily poems, in ‘The Quiet Corner’, continued throughout World War II until 1946 when her column was transferred to the Sunday Pictorial (later The Sunday Mirror) and continued for several decades. She also contributed poems to the weekly magazine Woman's Own and latterly to the quarterly magazine, This England. Her poems were also published in various anthologies and she made two records reciting her poems.
If you stand very still in the heat of a wood
You will hear many wonderful things;
The snap of a twig and the wind in the trees,
And the whirr of invisible wings.
...
March wind, wild wind, blow this day.
Whirl the winter snow away. Dry the
ditches and the hollows-in tracks where
April follows. Clear a path for her advance.
...
Death is not a sleep, but an awakening
to Life. Casting off the dreams of
darkness, sorrow, sin and strife-the soul
arising greets the glory of the morning ray-
...
We depend upon each other, each one in
his own small way - giving something
of himself in terms of service day by day -
working for his own reward yet adding to the
...
Westward sailed the Mayflower pilgrims to a better land -
Where in freedom they might live - as Puritans to stand -
For liberty of mind and soul, prepared to sacrifice
- all they had for this one thing: the pearl beyond all price ...
...
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