Nine lines, and hardly a sentence among them. What stands out in "The smell of roses" is that it never completes a thought in the usual grammatical way. There is no "she walks" or "he feels," only a chain of -ing words (talking, waving, following, capturing, torturing, burning, pushing, teasing) that makes the scene feel caught mid-motion, with no start and no end. Nothing is given here about who FeelzPoetry is or when the poem was written, so the text itself is the best evidence.
On the surface, a woman is alone, a man is drawn to her, and the attraction hurts. The central idea is desire as something that happens *to* a person. The man appears only as "him," and he is always the object of a verb: captured, tortured, burned. He never does anything. The poem suggests that to be attracted is to lose control.
The opening is quietly strange. "Alone. / Talking with her shadow." makes her self-contained, absorbed in her own company, perhaps unaware she is being watched. Then comes "Waving her golden hair around," where the loose word "around" makes the gesture careless, almost aimless. Yet the last line insists on the opposite, so the reader is left wondering whether the teasing is deliberate or only exists in the eyes of the watcher. The poem never says. Because "I" never appears, the viewpoint seems to belong to someone close and affected, perhaps the man himself, though that is an inference from the intensity of the verbs.
The roses do a lot of work. The title names the smell, but the poem calls it "the essence of roses," a phrase that means perfume and also suggests her essential nature. Like her shadow, the scent attends her, but where the shadow is dark and silent, the scent drifts outward and cannot be refused. You can look away from a woman; you cannot stop breathing. Roses also carry the old association of beauty with thorns, and the poem's verbs go the way of the thorns.
Those verbs escalate. Capturing is restraint, torturing is prolonged pain, and burning is heat. That last one quietly connects to the "golden hair," since gold and flame share a colour, so the hair begins to look like a fire he is being pulled toward. Then comes the turn: "Pushing him closer." Pushing normally sends something away, but here it brings him nearer. That paradox is the heart of the poem. The more he suffers, the closer he gets.
The sound and shape support this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the rhythm comes from repetition. "Capturing him. / Torturing him. / Burning him." is three identical grammatical blows, each ending in the same soft "-ing" and the same pronoun, so the reader feels a tightening. A full stop after every line, even where the sentence could flow on, makes each image land separately, like a pulse.
The ending is the cleverest decision. "Teasing." drops the "him" that has followed every earlier verb, and it stands alone as "Alone." did at the start. The two single-word lines frame the poem, moving from her isolation to her effect on others. Because "Teasing" has no object and no resolution, the poem finishes without finishing, which is exactly what teasing does. The form matches the content: the poem withholds a complete sentence just as the woman withholds fulfilment.
As for significance, the poem leans on familiar romantic material (golden hair, roses, burning), and a critical reader might call those images stock. Its interest lies elsewhere, in how much it achieves with grammar alone. It builds a whole relationship from verbs, makes point of view out of absence, and leaves a real ambiguity in the middle. Who is doing the capturing, the woman, her hair, or the scent that follows her? The syntax allows all three, and that openness is what makes a short, simple-looking poem worth a second reading.