Neither Yarrow nor Lipton remembers the verse in detail, and the paper left in Yarrow's typewriter in 1958 has since been lost. In it, Puff found another child and played with him.
The original poem also had a stanza that was not incorporated into the song. Yarrow now sings the line "A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys" as "A dragon lives forever, but not so girls and boys", to be fair to boys and girls. On making contact, Yarrow gave Lipton half the songwriting credit, and he still gets royalties from the song. He then forgot about it until years later, when a friend called and told him Yarrow was looking for him, to give him credit for the lyrics. He used Yarrow's typewriter to get the poem out of his head. Lipton was friends with Yarrow's housemate when they were all students at Cornell. The song's story takes place "by the sea" in the fictional land of "Honah Lee". The lyrics tell a story of the ageless dragon Puff and his playmate, Jackie Paper, a little boy who grows up and moves on from the imaginary adventures of childhood, leaving a disheartened Puff on his own.
Lipton was inspired by an Ogden Nash poem titled " Custard the Dragon", about a "realio, trulio little pet dragon". The lyrics for "Puff, the Magic Dragon" are based on a 1959 poem by Leonard Lipton, then a 19-year-old Cornell University student. 4 Notable recordings and chart performance.