From Sunset to Star Rise

Christina Rossetti

1830 to 1894

Poem Image

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.