The coach is already at the door, and before the first stanza ends the children have climbed aboard and begun to sing. That brisk opening sets up the poem's mixture of feelings. The children are "eager," yet what they sing is a farewell. Stevenson never says whether they are happy or sad, and that is where the poem gets its truth. For a child, leaving is both an adventure and a small bereavement, and here the two share a single breath.
The construction is simple and deliberate. There are four stanzas of four lines, each line built on a light eight-syllable beat ("The COACH is AT the DOOR at LAST"), with the rhymes arriving in couplets. The last line never changes: "Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!" Each time, the line before it rhymes with it: *sing*, *swing*, *cling*, *sing*. That repeated *-ing* makes the poem feel like a chant, something to be shouted from a window, and the steady beat could easily be the rhythm of a moving coach. The refrain holds the poem together the way a chorus holds a song.
The refrain's key word is "everything." The children do not say goodbye to "the farm." They say goodbye to all of it, and nothing is too small to be included. The list in the second stanza shows what matters to them: "house and garden, field and lawn, / The meadow-gates we swang upon, / To pump and stable, tree and swing." There is no sunset or view here, only things you can use, climb, pump and swing on. Even the grammar sounds like a child talking, with "swang" in place of the standard "swung." The farm is remembered through play, not scenery.
The third stanza goes furthest into this child's-eye view. The language suddenly turns grand and old-fashioned: "fare you well for evermore, / O ladder at the hayloft door." Addressing a ladder with a solemn "O" is comic, but it is also tender, because the children treat the ladder as a friend worth a proper farewell. Then the camera moves in again, to "the cobwebs" in the hayloft. An adult would not miss cobwebs, but a child who has explored that loft would know them well. The detail suggests how closely the place has been known. The first three stanzas keep zooming in, from the coach to the whole property, then to one ladder, then to a cobweb.
The fourth stanza reverses that movement. "Crack goes the whip, and off we go" arrives as a sudden sound, and the departure that has been postponed through three stanzas finally happens. Then the syntax lets the shrinking happen on the page: "The trees and houses smaller grow." Putting the verb last makes the line itself seem to dwindle. The last landmark is "the woody turn," where the trees close over the farm and cut off the view. The refrain is word for word the same, but its meaning has changed. It was first sung at a door and is now sung to something that has almost vanished.
There is also a quiet shift in who is speaking. The first stanza describes "the eager children" from outside, as if we were watching from the farmyard. From the second stanza on it is "we": "we swang upon," "off we go," "we sing." The reader is gradually pulled onto the coach and seated among the children, so the loss becomes ours as well.
The poem is significant for how much feeling it gets from so little. It makes no speech about memory or time, and no adult steps in to explain what the children are going through. It trusts a list of ordinary objects and a repeated line to carry the weight. Its final image is of children in between places, no longer at the farm and not yet anywhere else, who handle the moment by singing. Singing does not hide their sadness, but it makes the sadness bearable, and that may be why the poem lingers after so few lines.