Old Age’s Ship & Crafty Death’s

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

From east and west across the horizon’s edge,
Two mighty masterful vessels sailers steal upon us:
But we’ll make race a-time upon the seas⁠—a battle-contest yet! bear lively there!
(Our joys of strife and derring-do to the last!)
Put on the old ship all her power to-day!
Crowd top-sail, top-gallant and royal studding-sails,
Out challenge and defiance⁠—flags and flaunting pennants added,
As we take to the open⁠—take to the deepest, freest waters.

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–#L8.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “Old Age’s Ship & Crafty Death’s.” First published in Good-Bye My Fancy (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/old-ages-ship-crafty-deaths/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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