"Away, Melancholy" begins by painting a portrait of its speaker's sadness:
Away, melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.
This speaker, readers gather, must have been struggling with melancholy—a profound, enduring sadness, even a depression—for a long time. They're ready to be done with it now. But melancholy can't be turfed out so easily as all that. Even the speaker's anaphora on the word "away" makes it clear that this sorrow is hard to budge: one "away" won't do it.
For that matter, the speaker isn't just pushing melancholy away, but telling themselves to "let it go," words that suggest the speaker may find melancholy as hard to resist as it is to endure. The world, after all, is full of things to despair about.
Written in flexible free verse (with no set rhyme scheme or meter), the poem will shift its shape just as the speaker's thoughts do. Within this ever-changing shape, the words of the first stanza will become a refrain: the poem's backbone and its reason for being.
The speaker begins the second stanza of their quest to escape melancholy by doing what poets have often done: turning to the natural world for comfort. After all:
Are not the trees green,
The earth as green?
The speaker's diacope on the word "green" paints a picture of a lush landscape, verdant as far as the eye can see. In the face of such loveliness, the speaker's rhetorical question seems to ask, who could despair? For that matter, as long as "the wind blow[s], / Fire leap[s] and the rivers flow," who could doubt that the world's beauty and the cycles of nature are bigger and more enduring than any one person's sadness?
The cry of "Away, melancholy" that ends the stanza seems to say, That ought to do it. But as the next stanza will show, this particular speaker's melancholy doesn't surrender to natural beauty as readily as, say, Mary Oliver's does.