The poem opens with a command, "Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not", and it sounds like a door being shut. The speaker tells her companions to leave and describes herself in the least inviting terms she can find. She is "wintry cold", a "silly sheep benighted from the fold", a "sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot". Her reason sounds generous at first. Stay, and you will "shiver on the wold, / Athirst and hungering on a barren spot." The speaker presents her loneliness as a favour to others. Only in the last three lines does the poem admit that she misses the very warmth she has refused.
The opening pun on "summer friends" does a lot of work. The phrase normally means fair-weather friends, people who vanish when times get hard. Rossetti makes the idiom literal by turning it into a contrast of seasons: they belong to summer, she to winter. Her self-portrait then piles up images of being lost and neglected. "Silly" probably carries its older sense of helpless or defenceless, and the sheep, lost at night, recalls the familiar Christian image of the straying flock. The sluggard's thorny plot may echo biblical language too, though that is an inference from the imagery rather than something the poem states. Either way, she blames herself. Nobody has abandoned her. She calls herself the one who let the garden choke.
The form reinforces this closed-in feeling. The poem is a sonnet in iambic pentameter, with an octave rhyming *abba abba* and a sestet rhyming *cdc ede*. The octave's rhymes pair the blunt, heavy words "not", "plot", "lot" and "spot" with "cold", "fold", "gold" and "wold". These sounds keep returning like walls, and the speaker cannot get out of them. The odd word is "gold", the one thing the friends are told to "hoard", and it is the only rhyme that suggests comfort. The commands also pile up ("Go", "Take counsel", "sever", "Dwell", "hoard"), so the speaker sounds firm and almost brisk.
Then comes the "thorny hedge", and its wording is worth noticing: "I have hedged me with a thorny hedge." The repeated sound makes the line circle back on itself, as if she were enclosed in her own sentence. The hedge protects her, but it also imprisons her, and the thorns recall the "thorn-choked" garden of line 4. She has built her own isolation: "I live alone, I look to die alone." The line is flat and unadorned, and it is the bleakest in the poem.
The turn comes at "Yet", and it arrives late. In a sonnet of this type we might expect a change at line 9, but Rossetti lets the argument run on until line 11. The shift is small and quiet, triggered only by "a wind" that "sighs through the sedge". That sigh sets off another one: "My heart goes sighing after swallows flown." The wind and the heart answer each other, and the speaker's defences give way. The "Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back" makes the line stretch longer in meaning and rhythm, as if memory were crowding in. It is also ambiguous. The ghosts may be the years themselves, or the friends, or both.
The closing rhymes carry the poem's ache. "Alone" in line 10 rhymes with "flown" in line 13, so the declared solitude and the secret longing are tied together by sound. Then "back" rhymes with "track", and the last phrase, "unreturning track", contradicts the "come back" of the line before. Swallows do migrate and return, but the summer she remembers will not. The word "sometime", meaning "former", makes that summer feel both distant and dear.
The poem is significant because it does not resolve into either despair or consolation. The speaker insists on her coldness, yet her imagery keeps betraying how much she wants summer back. A strict form holds that contradiction, and the most honest feeling in the poem slips out in the last three lines, quietly, without any outcry. The title's "Sunset to Star Rise" suggests the dusk between day and night, which suits a speaker caught between warmth she has lost and a darkness she has half chosen.