The Gate of the Year

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The Gate of the Year is a poem by Minnie Louise Haskins, an American academic who studied and then taught at the London School of Economics in the first half of the twentieth century.

The poem, published in 1908, was part of a collection entitled "The Desert". It caught the public attention and the popular imagination, when Queen Elizabeth handed a copy to her husband, King George VI, and he quoted it in his 1939 Christmas broadcast to the British Empire.

The poem was widely acclaimed as inspirational, reaching (as it did) its first mass audience in the early days of the Second World War. Its words remained a source of comfort to the Queen for the rest of her life, and she had its words engraved on brass plaques and fixed to the gates of the King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle where the King was interred. Subsequently Queen Elizabeth was also buried here after her death in 2002, and the words of "The Gate of the Year" were read out at her state funeral.