Farewell Dear Mate, Dear Love!

In the second annex of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Whitman includes two poems, “Good-Bye my Fancy” and “Good-Bye my Fancy!” titled respectively. The first “fancy” poem is really only the words “Good-bye my fancy” and then an aside contained in parentheses, and a footnote delving into the act of saying “bye” and the obsession humans have over last words; the poem is then followed by a collection of poems, then the annex is ended with the second “fancy” poem. The second “fancy” poem feels much more final, as it ends the annex, among other things. In contrast to the first “fancy” poem, the second is an extremely long and drawn out goodbye, where Whitman wants to depart from his supposed reader but cannot bring himself to do so.

A note I brought up in class last week was that I believe it is interesting to think of the two “Good-Bye my Fancy” poems as being read in conjunction with one another. Throughout Whitman’s career, not only the very end, Whitman has a strange obsession with saying “bye” to his reader, which is what he is doing here. However, the first “fancy” poem is not really a good-bye, Whitman makes the point that although he is saying farewell, he cannot yet say exactly what he wants to as “[He has] a word to say…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.” Essentially, Whitman has a specific word he wants to say to the audience (presumably using the word “love” in place of “fancy”) but he cannot “till the last,” taken to mean his deathbed. I find Whitman’s reluctance to use to the word interesting because it juxtaposes the footnote drastically. The footnote is Whitman questioning the societal importance of last words because they do not accurately demonstrate what the deceased’s life was like. The first “fancy” poem, Whitman questions choosing last words carefully, while choosing his “last words” carefully. Further, the way I read this poem was that Whitman was emphasizing the importance of the other “fancy” poem, while also safeguarding himself by urging readers to not look too far into last words in the case that his late work cannot live up to his earlier writings.

The second “Good-Bye my Fancy!” is immediately accentuating its priority over its predecessor by the addition of an exclamation point into the title. In the first poem, there was a hesitation from Whitman to call the audience his love, but in the second line of this poem he says, “Farewell dear mate, dear love!” Right from the gate, the poem feels much more final than the first, as he is stating exactly how he feels about those who care enough to read his entire piece. As the poem continues, Whitman will says good-bye repeatedly, but then stops to “look back a moment” or to “not be too hasty” with his good-bye. A big part of Whitman’s delay to officially have said good-bye is contained in the fact that he knows how impactful his works are, and if he had not given the previous statement about viewing last words too closely, I think this poem would receive more scrutinizing. Then when the final “Good-bye” comes in the poem it is clear that it is the final farewell.

I am including a photograph of what the second annex looks like as an individual piece, because through its years as a published work it is both published as a part of Leaves of Grassand on its own. The second annex is actually titled “Good-Bye my Fancy” and seeing those words not solely on the page in print, but as the golden-stamped words on the cover show the attention Whitman is drawing to that being the last time he will say “so long!”