The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns―alone―
It is the gift of Screws―
The General Rose―decay―
But this―in Lady’s Drawer
Make Summer―When the Lady lie
In Ceaseless Rosemary―
-Fr772, J675, Fascicle 34, 1863
This is the last poem of Fascicle 34, and it's a beauty. The poem can, itself, be compared to the attar from the rose. The physical flower, Emily, has long gone, but in her poetry she leaves behind her condensed essence, her roseate fragrance. There are a whole host of Emily Dickinson poems which may be read as expressing her poetics, in which she is commenting on the art of writing poetry, and this one is a prime example. As I was researching this poem I came across a terrific commentary by Ira Fader, who, it turns out, is a fan of The Prowling Bee. I'm going to let Ira have the floor for this one. Take it away, Ira.
"Which word is unlike the other words: Oils, Attar, Rose, Suns, gift, Screws.
Screws. There among the beautiful things are pieces of fabricated metal for tools and machines. It stands out, doesn’t it?
Emily Dickinson’s poetry is like a bowl of walnuts. A walnut has a shell-like fortress, and over the centuries we’ve invented some rather ornate screws to crack the walls and give ourselves the gift of its delicious seed.
A vintage nutcracker is a good metaphor for what I need when I read Dickinson’s poetry. I love her poetry. All of it. But she is, as they say, a tough nut to crack, and I have to work hard at it. But I keep turning that screw. I’ll read the poem many times, look up words in the Emily Dickinson Lexicon, search online, and crack open Helen Vendler’s book on Dickinson and several others I own. Keep turning the screw.
And at some point the implacable walnut shell cracks open, and inside there is always — a pearl.
That’s a metaphor within a metaphor, but it is wrong. A Dickinson poem doesn’t simply yield up its fruit or its seed, much less its pearls. No, you crack open the walnut, and inside is another walnut.
When I read Walt Whitman, we jauntily walk side by side down the road within his multitudinous world of wonder. When I read Dickinson, I don’t know if I am inside her mind or if she is inside mine. But I am always in a mysterious, perplexing, deeply thought-provoking, sometimes scary but always beautiful place.
Essential Oils are wrung is one of the first Dickinson poems I read when I started reading poetry more studiously in the past ten years. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I suspected I liked it. I suspected but couldn’t be sure because reading poetry, particularly hers, takes some getting used to. A new reader has to retrain the mind to stop reading narratively, linearly, and logically. And quickly. Speed-reading is poetry’s natural enemy.
And then Dickinson adds layers of her own brand of difficulty with startling syntax, grammatical license, capitalizations, odd dashes, and elisions in language.
I was captivated nonetheless by Essential Oils. It was an early lesson in finding enjoyment despite uncertainty in reading.
I could see the poem had something to do with summer, roses, and death. It was time to bring out the nutcracker.
Essential oils, of course, are the extracted oils of plants. The oils’ organic compounds are what gives the plant its fragrance, and these oils have been used in perfumes, sachets, cosmetics, and soaps for thousands of years. The oil from many delicate flowers and plants — including the rose — is extracted by a process of steam distillation, which causes the aromatic compounds in the petals to vaporize. The vapor is then condensed into a liquid and voila! essential oil. The rose has affirmed itself a soul.
But Dickinson tells us in the first line that “essential oils are wrung,” not distilled. And in particular, the attar of the rose — that is, its essential oil — is not “expressed” merely by basking in “the Suns” of a fragrant summer. No, the rose’s perfume is “expressed” by “Screws.” Did a “gift” ever sound so painful?
Curious. In the Emily Dickinson Lexicon, the word “screw” is defined not only as the spiral fastener we all know but also as a “press; [an] apparatus for extracting the essence.” In Dickinson’s time, the two most common methods of extracting essential oil from plants were steam distillation and expression. The proper method for extracting essential oil from rose petals was steam distillation. Expression, on the other hand, was used to extract the oils of citrus peels because these were much tougher than rose petals and would yield their fragrant compounds by being pressed in what was called an “expression machine.”
But Dickinson said the rose’s oils were wrung, were expressed by screws. Was she misattributing the gift of rose perfume to the torturous screws of an expression machine rather than the gentler steam of a distillation machine?
I am entirely certain the answer is “no.” Dickinson knew exactly what she was saying.
In the second stanza, Dickinson gently reminds us that life is fleeting: “The General Rose — decay — .” First of all, what an interesting phrase: the General Rose. I love that. It’s something bigger than this particular rose, bigger than the rose bush, bigger than Roses. The General Rose is life itself, it seems to me, manifest in flowers and in ourselves. We do not stand apart from the “General Rose,” and we too will “decay,” just like “the Lady” who lies “in Ceaseless Rosemary” at the end of the poem. (In an earlier version of the poem, the lady’s resting place was less metaphorical and more grim: Dickinson said she lay “in spiceless Sepulchre.”)
Rosemary is a herb deeply rooted in history and tradition as a symbol of remembrance. Remembrance is how we keep our lost loved ones alive at least a little longer, just as the attar of the rose “make summer” after summer has gone.
Life in the mid-19th century was hard. Death was always nearby for Dickinson, and she engaged in a lifelong exploration of its presence and meaning both in her own life and universally, both spiritually and physically. What is the “essential oil” of a life lived in the shadow of Death? How hard is it to extract for use in our betterment? Or how hard for remembrance to be wrung from our short, tumultuous time on earth?
The General Rose decays, Dickinson tells us, “But this — in Lady’s Drawer / Make Summer…” What is “this” in the Lady’s Drawer? Surely it is a sachet, prolonging the essential life of the roses that have yielded the oils from their petals, wrung painfully by screws. The rose, now decayed, lives on in its fragrance, it “make[s] summer” after summer has passed, when summer is a memory and “the Lady lie in ceaseless Rosemary.”
But why did Dickinson wish to subject delicate rose petals to the metal violence of “Screws”? Couldn’t the poet’s dramatic point have been achieved with botanical fragrances released by summery steam through the process of distillation? Wouldn’t the distilled attar in Lady’s Drawer still “Make Summer”? (I pause to note the wonderful “slant rhyme” of “Rose” and “Screws,” slanted by both sound and substance.)
No, essential oil must be realized through a process more anguishing than the gentler process of steam distillation. We learn from our pain, we are deepened by grief, and our own essential oil is wrung from the experience of living. It is the gift of screws.
This is the pearl inside the uncracked walnut."
-/)dam Wade I)eGraff
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