Essential Oils — are wrung

Literary Commentary

Eight lines, two stanzas, and a central image drawn from the perfume trade: 'Essential Oils — are wrung' is Emily Dickinson's most compact statement of what poems are and what they cost. Written around 1863, Fr772 treats the attar of roses — the concentrated oil pressed from Damask rose petals — as a figure for the poem itself. The rose must be broken before its essence will emerge; the essence then outlasts the flower and the body that wore its scent. What Dickinson proposes is a bleak, unsentimental consolation: poetic labor is violent, and its reward is posthumous.

In April 1862, something happened that this poem would answer a year later. Thomas Wentworth Higginson published 'Letter to a Young Contributor' in the Atlantic Monthly; the essay contained the line, 'Literature is attar of roses, one distilled drop from a million blossoms.' Dickinson wrote to Higginson that month, enclosing four poems and asking whether her verse was 'alive.' A year later she returned to his metaphor and pushed past his gentler term. Higginson had written 'distilled'; Dickinson writes 'wrung.' Heat alone will not do. The instrument she names is 'the gift of Screws.'

The second stanza shifts from process to aftermath. The General Rose decays; the rose-essence survives, folded into a Lady's drawer, making summer for her even after she has lain down 'In Ceaseless Rosemary' — rosemary being, in the Shakespearean tradition Dickinson knew well, the herb of remembrance. The third-person 'Lady' keeps the poem at a small but studied distance from the author. Readers familiar with Dickinson's private practice — the hand-sewn fascicles kept in her own drawer, unread by the world until after her death — have often heard the biographical resonance. The poem does not require that reading to succeed. It succeeds on the simpler and harder proposition that extract outlives flower.

Key themes

• Poetic immortality
• The violence of artistic creation
• Essence versus surface
• Private art and posthumous afterlife
• The work of preservation

Notable craft elements

• Hymn-meter variant with slant rhyme (Rose / Screws; Drawer / Rosemary)
• The dash as caesura, visually enacting the wringing motion
• Sound cluster in stanza one: wrung, Rose, Screws, Suns, a concentration of hard consonants that mimics the compression described
• Two-stanza architecture: stanza one renders the process; stanza two delivers the result

Reread prompt

What changes in the poem's argument if you read the Lady as the rose, and what changes if you read her as the poet herself?

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