And whence and why come you?
We know not whence, (was the answer,) We only know that we drift here with the rest, That we linger’d and lagg’d—but were wafted at last, and are now here, To make the passing shower’s concluding drops.
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. [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–#L5.
Cite this poem
Walt Whitman (1819–1892).
“Lingering Last Drops.” First published in Good-Bye My Fancy (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/lingering-last-drops/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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