Four short lines look back on a time that flowered and collapsed almost in one breath. The speaker says "we", so this is a shared memory, a group of kids remembering what they were. The poem never says what blossomed. It could be a friendship, a first love, a version of themselves, or all three. Its central idea is that the speed that made the good time so intense is the same speed that wrecked it. The poem makes no argument about this. It says "too fast" twice and lets the repetition do the work.
The first line, "We blossomed too fast," borrows its imagery from gardens. A blossom is the showiest stage of a plant and also one of the briefest, so the word already carries its own warning. Yet the last line does not follow the metaphor through. We might expect "we wilted" or "we withered". Instead we get "Our decline was too fast", and "decline" is a cool, abstract word that belongs to medical charts and economic reports. The flower language of youth has been replaced by the vocabulary of someone assessing damage. The pronoun shifts too, from "We", who did the blossoming, to "Our", which makes the decline a thing that happened to them. At the start they act, and by the end they are only owners of the result.
The middle of the poem is the strangest part. "Hours that were only short. / Have since passed." Read the lines aloud and notice the full stop after "short". It splits a single sentence in two, leaving "Hours that were only short" without a verb and "Have since passed" without a subject. The grammar breaks at exactly the point where the time has vanished. The phrase "only short" is odd as well. Hours are all the same length, so what was short was how they felt. "Only" can be read as a shrug, as if the hours were nothing special, just brief. It can also be read as a wince, as if brevity was the whole tragedy.
The sound of the poem is tightly controlled. "Fast" and "passed" are a near-perfect rhyme, both closing on a clipped *t*. The final line brings "fast" back, so the rhyme circles round and the poem ends almost where it started. "Short" is the only line-ending left unrhymed, and it sits in the longest line, which is a small irony. The lines get shorter after that, shrinking to the three-syllable "Have since passed", as though the poem were running out of time as it speaks. Then comes a stanza break and a single line alone on the page. The white space acts like a pause after bad news, and the last line works as a verdict or an epitaph, depending on how bitter you hear it.
The title adds another layer. "Melodramatic Kids" sounds like a label other people stick on teenagers to wave away their feelings. The poem itself is the opposite of melodrama. It has no exclamation marks, no explanations and no tears, only flat statements. One reading is that the poem quietly answers the accusation. What looked like overreaction from outside was simply accurate, and the speaker can describe it calmly because it really did happen that quickly. The numeral "III" suggests this piece belongs to a sequence, but read alone it stands up well.
The poem matters because of how much it leaves out. In so few words it builds a before and an after, an image that turns into an abstraction, and a sentence that breaks in the middle. It also trusts the reader to supply the missing subject. The sting is not simply that the good time ended. By the end, "too fast" suggests that nobody could have slowed it down, and perhaps nobody noticed until the hours had passed.