Nobody in this poem is cruel, which is why it is so hard to shake. Rossetti's ghost goes back to a house full of friends and finds them eating, drinking, singing and joking, doing nothing wrong at all. The sadness lies in how little the visit changes. Death here is not a punishment or a gateway. It means becoming the past while everyone else is still busy with the future.
The poem argues through its tenses. The friends speak only of "to-morrow," a word the third stanza repeats until it becomes a chant, and one line states the cost plainly: "While no one spoke of yesterday." By the end of the stanza the grammar has sorted everyone into two camps. They are "to-morrow and to-day," while the speaker is "of yesterday." The rhymes make the same point. In that stanza a single sound runs through "way," "yesterday," "away" and "yesterday" again, so the word for the dead person's place in time arrives twice, like a bell.
The friends' world is bodily and bright. Their feast takes place "beneath green orange boughs," with wine passed "from hand to hand," and they "sucked the pulp of plum and peach." That verb is blunt and physical, a pleasure the ghost can only watch. Their plans for tomorrow are full of space: "featureless sands," "miles and miles of sea," an "eyrie-seat" to be reached before the tide turns. Even the dull "Plod plod" sounds like happiness when the alternative is no journey at all. Against this, the ghost's whole range of movement is to pass a door and later leave a room. The word "passed" does triple duty, since the speaker "passed the door," then "passed away," then "passed from the familiar room." Walking out and dying become one gesture.
The form is plain. There are four eight-line stanzas, mostly in iambic tetrameter, and only the even lines rhyme (house/boughs, peach/each). The unrhymed lines in between give the poem the loose, overheard feel of conversation, as if we were eavesdropping with the ghost. Each stanza ends on a shortened line, such as "For each was loved of each" or "That tarrieth but a day," so every stanza closes with a small drop. The first of those lines loops back on itself, "each" meeting "each," a closed circle of mutual love. When the last stanza describes the speaker as "I who from love had passed away," the circle has no place left in it.
Tenderness is what keeps the poem from melodrama. The ghost "shivered comfortless, but cast / No chill across the table-cloth." Its last act is to avoid spoiling the party. The friends' talk is called "honest chat," and the poem never blames them for being full of life. "Their life stood full at blessed noon," at the hour when the sun casts almost no shadow, and the ghost is the only shadow in the room. Even the speaker's feelings are split, "sad / To stay, and yet to part how loth," reluctant both to remain and to go.
The closing simile is the cruellest touch. The ghost compares itself to "the remembrance of a guest / That tarrieth but a day." The old-fashioned "tarrieth" gives the line a biblical ring, as though it were a proverb about how brief a life is. But the only remembrance in the poem is this figure of speech. No one at the table remembers anyone. The speaker is "all-forgotten," and the simile describes a memory that nobody actually has.
The poem matters for the way it turns the ghost story inside out. The living are not frightened and the dead are not vengeful. The one who is haunted is the dead, by the sight of a world that keeps going without them. There are no angels, judgments or consolations, only a warm room, a cold visitor and a word, "yesterday," that settles over the speaker like a final label. Its fear is not of pain but of being gently, innocently left behind.