The speaker sends her summer friends away, insisting she’s no warm companion but a wintry soul — a stray sheep, a sluggard whose garden is choked with thorns. She urges them to separate their lives from hers, to gather their gold and stay in pleasant places, rather than risk hunger and cold on the empty moors with her. She’s deliberately hedged herself in with a thorny barrier, resigned to living and dying alone. Yet the poem’s final lines reveal the ache beneath her isolation: when the wind sighs through the sedge, ghosts of buried years and friends return, and her heart follows the flight of swallows long gone, tracing a summer that will never come back. The mood is cool and resigned, but underneath runs a deep, quiet sorrow for lost warmth and company.
From Sunset to Star Rise — Summary
Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not: I am no summer friend, but wintry cold, A silly sheep benighted from the fold, A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot. Take counsel, sever from my lot your lot, Dwell in your pleasant places, hoard your gold; Lest you with me should shiver on the wold, Athirst and hungering on a barren spot. For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge, I live alone, I look to die alone: Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge, Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back, My heart goes sighing after swallows flown On sometime summer's unreturning track.