Five short lines take the speaker from the top of the world to something close to panic. Elijah opens with a claim as large as a claim can be, "sometimes i feel im the happiest o earth", and closes with a request so plain it needs no punctuation: "I need it back." Everything between is about one unsettling fact: a feeling that seemed unbreakable can vanish with nobody to blame. That is the poem's central idea. Happiness here is not earned or lost through events. It comes and goes on its own schedule, and the speaker is left standing in the gap.
The first two lines build with total confidence. "Happiest" is a superlative, and "nothing can or will stop my smiles" is an absolute that covers both what is possible ("can") and what is certain ("will"). The plural "smiles" makes the joy repeated and physical, something that keeps breaking out on the face. But the word "sometimes" sits quietly at the very start and changes how we read everything after it. This is not a one-off. The poem suggests a speaker who has been here before, and who therefore also knows what follows. The line itself reads "o earth", with a gap where a letter seems to be missing. Most readers will supply "on" without thinking, and the slip gives the line the feel of something written in a rush, too full to be checked.
Then the poem turns on three words: "then it goes." Look at what happens to the line lengths. The first two lines run to eight and seven words, and from here the poem shrinks to three, five, four. The poem seems to lose breath along with its speaker. There is a sharp irony in the logic too. The speaker has just said that nothing can stop the smiles, and now they stop, with no cause given. There is no bad news, no argument, no event at all. The only thing that defeats the happiness is the happiness leaving. Even the grammar slips away: "it" has no clear antecedent, since "smiles" is plural and "happiest" is only an adjective. The feeling is never named at the moment it disappears, which shows how hard it is to pin down.
Line four, "i don't know where though", treats that feeling like a lost object, something misplaced that might turn up if only the speaker knew where to look. "Where" is the question of someone searching. The trailing "though" is the most speech-like word in the poem. It hangs at the end of the line like a shrug, a half-formed attempt to qualify something that cannot be qualified. Nothing rhymes anywhere in the poem, since "earth", "smiles", "goes", "though" and "back" do not chime. But "goes" and "though" share the same long "o" sound, so a faint echo links the loss to the speaker's bewilderment about it.
The final line changes the tone. After a lowercase "i" in lines one and four, the capital "I" of "I need it back" arrives, and whether by design or accident, the self seems to stand up straighter at the moment of asking. The verb matters as well. The speaker says "need", not "want", so happiness becomes a necessity rather than a treat. And "back" implies it belonged to the speaker all along, as though it has been borrowed or taken. With no full stop, the poem ends open. No one answers the request, which mirrors the speaker's own uncertainty.
What makes the poem worth reading is what it refuses to do. It does not explain the sadness, dress it in a metaphor of storms or darkness, or finish on a lesson or a consoling turn. Joy gets two lines, loss gets three, and the plea gets a single short sentence, so the proportions match the experience: the good feeling is announced grandly, and its disappearance is quiet and bare. Many readers will recognise that sudden, unexplained drop in mood, and the poem's honesty lies in simply saying so. Its plain words and unfinished ending leave the reader holding the same question as the speaker: where does it go?