the emperor of ice cream poem

The Emperor of Ice-Cream | Poem Explanation | Wallace Stevens

 Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), a great modern American poet, was a man who worked in the law department of an insurance company all his life. Setting aside the socio-political and commercial problems of the world around him, he wrote what could be called, 'pure' poetry because he was a poet, philosopher and aesthete of a high order. Today, he is considered one of the greatest modernist poets of the twentieth century. In a way he could be called a poet's poet because, for him, art and aesthetics provided a substitute for religious faith in a world without belief. The subject of Stevens' poetry is poetry itself: its nature and function, the role of the poet, the creative mind, and the power of imagination to define reality. According to him, a poet's imagination works upon objective reality to create poetry that offers a modified reality in the form of 'supreme fiction'. The artist's imagination is the centre of meaning. It is 'the necessary angel'. Exceptionally original, Stevens' poetry is complex, syntactically radical, symbolic, colourful, full of lavish imagery, rich in sensuous metaphors, rhetorical and always linguistically experimental. An alert and careful reader can discern the influence on his poetry of philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Henri Bergson, George Santyayana, poets like Coleridge, Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the French symbolists, and painters like Cezanne, Manet and Picasso. To understand Stevens is to suspend one's rational faculties and to lose oneself imaginatively in his rich artistic imagery and evocative symbolism.

'The Emperor of Ice-Cream' is a favourite poem of Stevens' because, as he said, it 'wears a deliberately commonplace costume and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry'. When somebody asked him about the strange title, he replied that he used it because his daughter liked ice-cream very much. More seriously, one may view ice-cream as a kind of universally accepted fact of life, to which even death must yield. In fact, life is ice-cream, so also is death. The poem defies all attempts to reduce it to rational meaning. Stevens himself opposed such attempts because a poem has its origin in the imagination. In this sense, this poem is a good example of the dictum, 'a poem should not mean, but be'. Being and seeming present life's basic contrast, which Stevens' poetry has been trying to express. Apparently, this poem presents with the antithesis between the domain of death and that of luxuries, represented by ice-cream and cigars respectively. The occasion seems to be a funeral or a wake following the death of a poor woman. The two contrasting stanzas suggest that life will pursue the festive mood by which it survives, although it has to respect death. Stevens was probably inspired by Manet's impressionistic painting of a nude, 'Olympia,' as he worked on the two parallels in the poem.

'The Emperor of Ice-Cream' Poem

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Glossary

Line 1. roller here, one who rolls cigars with tobacco in order to smoke

Line 3. concupiscent of violent desire or sexual appetite

Line 4. wenches girls (probably used in a derogatory sense)

Line 4. dawdle (v) to idle

Line 7. finale the end or concluding part of an event

Line 9. dresser of deal chest of drawers made of deal wood

Line 10. sheet the winding sheet

Line 11. fantails pigeons with tails shaped like fans

Line 13. horny hard as a horn

Explanatory Notes

1.  Interpreting the poem depends on the following points which emerge out of a careful observation of the lines: that the poem presents a contrast of a comparison between the two pictures drawn in the two stanzas. This is obvious because the last line of each stanza is the same and the seventh line of each are verbally quite similar. Thus each stanza ends with a couplet wherein seem/cream, beam/cream rhyme. The first six lines of each stanza draw pictures-there is a 'visual' appeal about them, they resemble paintings. The first picture is moving, as if taken from a movie camera, showing details about the cigars, cups, curds, wenches, boys, flowers, newspapers-all these words are in the plural, suggesting plurality, multiplicity

The second picture is static, nothing moves here, it is fixed, as if taken in by the 'click' of a camera. This suits the picture of death presented in it. If this contrast is clear, the first pictures the flow of life, its tlux; the second, its ending in a full stop. The poet asks the reader to do something or let something happen, in both stanzas (look at verbs or sentence constructions: call, bid, let the wenches dawdle, let the boys bring, take, spread), so that the reader could observe the scenes and interpret them. The poet suggests that you have to reach your meaning and there may not be a single rational meaning.

2.   Stanza I is a picture of luxury and life, stanza 2 of poverty and death. The first is moving and pleasing. The second is static and sorrowful. The first is a snap of youth and pleasure, of cigars, boys and girls and flowers. The second is a record of the poor dead woman's furniture (a chest of drawers made of deal with three knobs missing), and the sheet which is inadequate even to cover her body. The first stanza gives abundance, the second records only want and a lack of everything.

3.   Look at the images of luxury and enjoyment in the first stanza. There is a big, muscular man who rolls his cigars himself and smokes them. The rich man dominates the house leading it to the sensual pleasures of eating, drinking, smoking and sexual desire. The metaphorical extension of whipping curds in kitchen cups is obvious. The adjective 'concupiscent' refers to sexual gratification. Even the image of manly cigars and kitchen cups indicates male-female possibilities. Young girls (wenches suggests mature women) parade in attractive dresses, while their suitors bring flowers for them. For these men and women, the present moment matters, not the past like the newspapers of last month. Thus, 'Let be be finale of seem.' This suggests that the appearance (seeming) of the picture indicates its reality What you see is real; appearance and reality match; the finality of seeming is its being. This clarity of meaning is given in the emphatic declarative sentence of the last line: 'The only emperor is the emperor of ice- cream'. "The transience or shortlivedness of life is supreme. It is so because it is beautiful, attractive and irresistible. It is so also because it is cold like death. Ice-cream is a symbol of life that is dying, it has its beauty because it is going to die. As Stevens puts it in a poem ('Sunday Morning'), 'Death is the mother of beauty'. 

4.  The second stanza makes you aware of actual death, after the idea of death is introduced in the first stanza. A poor woman's end ironically. indicates 'the finale of seem-her own death. Though the 'dresser of deal refers literally to the chest of drawers made of deal wood, it suggests metaphorically that death is the dresser who deals with the poor by not providing anything. The sheet is not enough to cover her feet. The hard reality of death is seen in her horny feet portruding. The only beauty spot in the picture is her embroidery of fantails. Her art could not help her. The poet tells the reader to, 'Let the lamp affix its beam.' The parallel between the two pictures of life and death is merely stated. Both are real. Man has to fix a bearn to see the significance of mortality. If you capture that you may become the emperor of ice- cream; short-lived but regal, transient but beautiful, dying but living. If life is ice-cream, we should presume that it is forever diminishing, so that we could become the emperor of ice-cream.