by Whitman · Cluster: Identity · Free Verse · Eternal Return

Abstract

A brief lyric on transience and origin: the late poems as the lingering concluding drops of a passing shower, drifting from an unknown source.

Connections

Motifs: Water Themes & Concepts: Transience, Mortality, Self and Cosmos Forms & Genres: Free Verse

Testo integrale / Full text

Cluster: GOOD-BYE MY FANCY

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.