Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, the internationally known Chilean poetess who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, was born at Vicuña in the province of Coquimbo on April 6, 1889, the daughter of Gerónimo Godoy, a school teacher and minor poet, and Petronila Alcayaga. When Lucila was only three years of age her father abandoned her mother; yet she apparently remembered him with deep filial affection and did not forget the following verses he had written for her: