The poem's poignant refrain shows the speaker grappling with suffering and finding the courage to embrace life in a painful world.
The refrain first appears in the poem's two opening lines:
Away, melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.
Here, at the outset of the poem, readers get the sense that the speaker is tired to death of being so "melancholy," but also that they might feel as if it's difficult to "let it go." To this speaker, it seems, melancholy might feel like both a burden and a crutch.
Every time these words (or a variation on them) appear through the rest of the poem—and they do so in nearly every stanza—their meaning evolves a little bit:
- In the second stanza, for instance, the words "Away, melancholy" appears after a series of comforting ideas about how the beauties of the natural world just keep rolling on regardless of one's feelings: the "rivers flow" and "fire leaps" anyway. When these lines conclude with an "Away, melancholy," it sounds as if the speaker is saying: Life goes on; therefore, go away, melancholy.
- But in the third stanza, the speaker has some gloomier thoughts about natural cycles, reflecting that "All things hurry / To be eaten or eat"—that it's a dog-eat-dog world for every living thing, in other words. When those thoughts conclude with an "Away, melancholy," it feels more as if the speaker is saying: Oh no, I've gone and made it worse—go away, melancholy!
As the poem goes on and the speaker begins to develop the idea that the human capacity even to imagine goodness might be cause for hope, the refrain starts to sound defiant, like a battle cry. By the time the poem ends with exactly the same words it began with, the speaker has a real reason to let go of their melancholy: if nothing else, the speaker can find hope in the idea that people believe in good even in the worst of times.
All those repetitions, though, might also suggest that hanging on to such hope is no easy task.