Lines 1-5

The epigraph appearing at the start of "Having it Out with Melancholy" sounds a rather foreboding note. The quote from Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard not only implies pessimism and hopelessness with its certainty that an "illness has no cure," but also sets the stage for an upcoming section of the poem in which the speaker lists her own "many remedies" that have been prescribed for her sickness.

The poem moves from the epigraph to the title of the first section, "From the Nursery," which lets the reader know right away that the speaker is going back in time to her infancy, a time when the human mind cannot really remember events that occurred. But, in the poem, she speaks clearly of what she saw and felt from her crib as though the memories are real, and she personifies her illness in order to...