fold one's tent

Idioms

Quietly depart, as in It's late, so let's fold our tents. This term is a partial quotation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem “The Day is Done” (1844): “And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares that infest the day, Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And quietly steal away.”

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023