Four short lines, and a mood is put to death in the first one. A child "killed his melancholy out of doors," and the rest of the poem is the adult speaker's response: he hears voices telling him to do likewise. They give three instructions, to turn, to talk with a knave, and to give. The poem is about how sadness might be cured by action rather than analysis, and the cure it proposes is plain: go outward.
The verb "killed" carries much of the poem's energy. We might expect a child's low mood to fade, drift off or be forgotten. Instead it is dispatched, as if melancholy were a small animal caught in the garden. That matches how children behave, since they tend to break out of a mood by running about rather than examining it. "Out of doors" works twice. It names a place, and it hints at a direction, away from the closed room where brooding thrives. The word "melancholy" is also the longest in the line, four slow syllables that sound heavy, so the short, hard "killed" cutting in just before it feels like a blow.
The poem then turns from "the child" to "I," and the verbs shift from action to listening. The child did something, while the speaker only hears. "Likewise" is the hinge, tying the adult's situation to the child's, but nothing says he obeys. All three later lines begin with "told me," a repetition that makes the voices sound like a steady, slightly insistent presence, perhaps wise counsel, perhaps something closer to compulsion. "I heard voices" also has an unsettling ring in a poem about low spirits, and the text leaves open whether these voices are a friend's advice, a memory or something more troubling.
The three instructions widen in scope. To "turn" is a private, bodily gesture, a change of direction that could also suggest turning away from a mood or a habit of thought. To "talk with a knave" brings in another person, and not an admirable one. A knave is a rogue, so the cure involves company that is a little disreputable and certainly not solemn. Ordinary good advice would send us to a wise friend, and these voices prefer someone livelier and less respectable. Then comes "give," with no object at all. Give money, attention, forgiveness, oneself? The poem refuses to say, and that absence lets the word reach furthest, since the speaker moves from turning, to talking, to giving, from self to other.
The rhythm supports this. Lines one and two are long, roughly eleven syllables each, with a loose, speech-like beat that nearly settles into pentameter without quite committing. Then the lines shrink to about seven syllables and finally four, so the poem seems to run out of breath just as the instructions become more demanding. There is no rhyme. Instead the sound ties the lines together by echo, as in the hard "k" of "child," "killed" and "melancholy," and the "t" sounds that run through "told," "talk," "to" and "turn." The effect is blunt and clipped, closer to commands than to song. The diction also sounds old-fashioned. Words like "likewise" and "knave" give the lines the feel of a very old piece of advice, though that is only an impression from the language, not something the text proves.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves unsaid. It sets a child's quick victory over sadness beside an adult's hesitation and trusts the contrast to do the work. It also avoids a neat ending. The last word, "give," hangs there unfinished, and we never learn whether the speaker turned, talked or gave. In that way the poem asks something of us too. It offers a small, rough remedy for melancholy and leaves the reader to decide whether to take it.