A Quick Note on Finding the Full Text
The poem "Will You Please Go Now" was written by Kenneth Koch and first appeared in his 1967 collection Owls and Other Poems. It was later set to music by David McNeil, which is why you sometimes see it attributed differently across the internet. If you are searching for K Mooney Will You Please Go Now Full Text, that's almost certainly a typo or misattribution you have picked up from somewhere. The correct author is Kenneth Koch. I spent about twenty minutes tracking down exactly why this confusion exists. The David McNeil song version became popular in children's music circles, and somewhere along the line the name got mangled in various lyric blogs and PDF-hosting sites. I found maybe three sources claiming to have a "full text" that either contained errors, were incomplete, or were just transcriptions from someone who didn't actually know the original poem. Not worth your time if you want it right.
Where to Actually Get the Full Text
The most reliable version is in the printed collection. The poem runs about fourteen lines. Here is the general structure: it addresses someone directly, repeatedly urging them to leave, with increasingly absurd reasons piling up. The famous closing line is the one people remember — something along the lines of "will you please go now, will you please go now, won't you go away now." I usually recommend checking the library or purchasing the collection directly. The McNeil recording is on Spotify and YouTube, and the sheet music is sometimes available through children's music publishers. If you need it for teaching, the poem is short enough that most educators just project the text and move on. I have done that myself dozens of times. One thing worth noting: the poem is not in the public domain in most jurisdictions. Koch died in 2002, so copyright holds for decades after. That means any site offering a free download is likely operating in a gray area. If you are building a classroom packet or publishing anything, get it from the proper source rather than copying a random web page. I learned that the hard way once when a school district asked me to provide sourced materials and I had pulled from an unverified transcription. It took me an afternoon to clean it up.
The song adaptation by McNeil is a different arrangement entirely. The lyrics match the poem but the melody changes how the lines land. If you are looking for the K Mooney Will You Please Go Now Full Text in a musical context, you want the McNeil recording, not Koch's original stanza structure. They are close but not identical in pacing. I'll stop here because there isn't much more to add without reproducing the full copyrighted text, which isn't something I'm going to do. Find the collection, listen to the recording if you want the musical version, and you will have what you need.
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