Attar production
Attar is concentrated rose oil—takes thousands of petals to make one drop. The 'screws' are literal: mechanical presses that crush the petals.
The general rose
'General' means common or ordinary. She's contrasting the living rose (which dies) with the extracted essence (which lasts).
Rosemary pun
Double meaning: rosemary the herb was laid on corpses, but also 'rose-memory'—the perfume remembers the summer rose.
Reading Notes
The Metaphor's Real Subject
This poem pretends to be about perfume-making, but it's actually about writing poetry. Dickinson is explaining her own artistic process through industrial metaphor.
The key is 'screws'—a deliberately harsh, mechanical word. She's saying beauty doesn't just happen naturally ('not expressed by suns alone'). It requires pressure, force, compression. The rose must be crushed. In poetry, this means: lived experience must be distilled, concentrated, wrung out through the painful work of revision.
CONTEXT Dickinson rarely published during her lifetime, but she obsessively revised her poems, sometimes creating multiple versions of the same piece. She knew about compression.
The payoff comes in the second stanza: 'The general rose decays'—the actual experience fades and dies. But the poem (the 'attar') 'makes summer' even after the poet is dead. The lady lies in her coffin, but her extracted essence—her poems—keep the experience alive. Poetry is preservation technology.
Death Words Everywhere
Notice how much death language Dickinson packs in: 'wrung' (wringing a neck), 'expressed' (pressed out), 'decays,' 'drawer' (where you store things for the dead), 'lies' (lying in state), 'rosemary' (funeral herb), 'ceaseless' (eternal/death).
The 'lady's drawer' is doing double work. Literally: a drawer where you keep sachets. But 'drawer' also suggests a drawer in a morgue, or a hope chest, or the drawer where Dickinson herself kept her poems (she stored nearly 1,800 poems in her bedroom dresser).
'Makes summer when the lady lies'—this is the poem's thesis. The verb is active: 'makes.' The perfume doesn't remind you of summer; it creates summer. It doesn't matter that the lady is dead. The essence she made outlasts her body. For Dickinson, who would be discovered only after death, this is prophecy.