Goodbye my fancy—(I had a word to say, But ’tis not quite the time—The best of any man’s word or say, Is when its proper place arrives—and for its meaning, I keep mine till the last.)
Where this text comes from
First published in Good-Bye My Fancy (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891). Printed in Good-Bye My Fancy, whose title page calls it the 2d Annex to Leaves of Grass, and gathered in as the Second Annex in 1891–92, which is the arrangement the corpus text follows. First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. This is the short poem at page 7 of the 1891 volume, beginning “Good-bye my Fancy—(I had a word to say”; the volume closes with a second, different poem of nearly the same title at page 20. [1]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass, goodbye-my-fancy.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (2)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L4.
Cite this poem
Walt Whitman (1819–1892).
“Good-Bye My Fancy.” First published in Good-Bye My Fancy (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/good-bye-my-fancy/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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