London ? Held in Britain’s grandest medieval church, the funeral for the Queen Mother Elizabeth was a deeply traditional, carefully orchestrated affair.

But a simple anonymous poem that has been bouncing around the world on the Internet lent a touch of new-age sentimentality to the royal farewell, leaving Britons speculating about its origins, and even sparking a bit of literary sleuthing.

“You can shed tears that she is gone, or you can smile because she has lived,” opens the poem, which was included in the program distributed at the queen mother’s Westminster Abbey funeral Tuesday. It was not read aloud.

“You can cry and close your mind, be empty and turn your back, or you can do what she’d want: smile, open your eyes, love and go on.”

A Buckingham Palace spokesman said Queen Elizabeth II chose the verse herself. He said the poem’s theme  giving thanks for a life rather than mourning a death  echoed that of a televised message in which the monarch said she was grateful for her mother’s long and happy years.

The queen mother died March 30 at age 101.

Theories about the poem’s authorship have been flying around the British media. It appears to have been circulating on the Internet for several years, and The Times newspaper  which has run a series of stories investigating its origins  reported the poem had been read at funerals around the English-speaking world.

Buckingham Palace said it was believed that the queen had first learned about the poem when she saw it in the funeral program of a family friend, the Dowager Viscountess De L’Isle.

Norfolk said about 100 readers contacted his newspaper about the poem, many with theories about its authorship.

They offered a bevy of ideas: it was a translation of a verse by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, an adaptation of an old American Indian work, a corruption of Christina Rossetti’s poem “Remember.”

Norfolk said many had erroneously attributed the poem to the Canadian-born Episcopal bishop, Charles Henry Brent, who was a U.S. Army chaplain in World War I.

The poem  which appears under several different titles and is variously written with the male, female and first-person pronouns  is posted on a Web site commemorating the life of an Ohio teen-ager who died last year.

The family of Australian rock musician Graeme “Shirley” Strachan reportedly printed the poem in his funeral program after he died in a helicopter crash.

Norfolk said he had heard of between 20 and 30 other funerals in which the verse played a part.

The poem does not appear in any major poetry indexes, and The Times speculated that it may originally have been written for a magazine or greeting card.