Goodbye My Fancy!

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Goodbye My Fancy · 1891

Goodbye my Fancy!
Farewell dear mate, dear love!
I’m going away, I know not where,
Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again,
So Goodbye my Fancy.

Now for my last⁠—let me look back a moment;
The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,
Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.

Long have we lived, joy’d, caress’d together;
Delightful!⁠—now separation⁠—Goodbye my Fancy.

Yet let me not be too hasty,
Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter’d, become really blended into one;
Then if we die we die together, (yes, we’ll remain one,)
If we go anywhere we’ll go together to meet what happens,
May-be we’ll be better off and blither, and learn something,
May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who knows?)
May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning⁠—so now finally,
Goodbye⁠—and hail! my Fancy.

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 closing poem at page 20 of the 1891 volume, beginning “Good-bye my Fancy! / Farewell dear mate, dear love!”; a second, different poem of nearly the same title stands at page 7. [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–#L18.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “Goodbye My Fancy!.” First published in Good-Bye My Fancy (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/goodbye-my-fancy/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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