By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ may well qualify for the accolade of ‘most baffling poem of the entire twentieth century’. Written by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) and published in his 1923 volume Harmonium, the poem is reproduced below, along with a brief analysis of the poem’s meaning and language.
Who, or what, is the Emperor of Ice-Cream? What is this curious poem saying? What is ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ about? These questions have perplexed readers and critics for nearly a century now, but there are a number of things we can declare with some certainty.
Summary
First, we can summarise the poem as follows. ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ is in two stanzas, both comprising eight lines. The first stanza is spoken by what Helen Vendler, in an important analysis of the poem, calls ‘an unknown master of ceremonies’.
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
This impresario gives out orders, demanding that a well-built man who works in a cigar-rolling factory whip up some ice-cream – for some guests, we surmise.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
He says let the ‘wenches’ (girls, though a more pejorative term) wear what they would normally wear; whatever event they are getting ready for, they needn’t get dressed up for. It is then requested that the boys bring flowers wrapped ‘in last month’s newspapers’.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Then things get more abstract: ‘Let be be finale of seem.’ Then we have a reference to the poem’s title, and are cryptically informed, ‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.’ We’ll return to this enigmatic statement shortly.
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.
From this talk of people being commanded to make certain preparations – which are, as Helen Vendler also pointed out, for a funeral – we then move, in the second stanza, to the room in which the solitary corpse of the dead woman is lying in state.
This master of ceremonies continues to give commands, asking that a sheet (on which the dead woman, when alive, embroidered fantails – small birds native to Asia and Australia) be taken from the dresser (which has three glass knobs missing from it), to cover the dead woman’s face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
If the woman’s feet stick out from the end (they are ‘horny’ because they are covered in unsightly bunions), because the sheet isn’t long enough to cover both her face and feet, we are told this doesn’t matter: far from being indecorous, it actually highlights the woman’s status as a dead person, her body cold, unable to make a sound.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
The ‘lamp’ should ‘affix its beam’ and shine fully on the woman: no hiding away her dead body and bunions from view. The poem then ends with the same line repeated from the end of the first stanza.
But we remain in the dark about who this ‘emperor of ice-cream’ really is. Who is he?
Analysis
Once we understand that the poem is about a funeral, things begin to make more sense. The cryptic command, ‘Let be be finale of seem’, follows three commands to do things which go against the usual social expectations for funerals: making ice-cream into ‘concupiscent curds’ (‘concupiscent’ meaning ‘filled with lust or sexual desire’: hardly appropriate for a solemn funeral), the women not getting dressed up in mourning clothes, the boys bringing flowers not neatly and decorously arranged but placed in last month’s newspapers, like a bag of chips.
Last month’s newspapers are a modern symbol of the ephemeral: newspapers are relevant only so long as the news remains new, which usually isn’t long.
This idea of recycling an old sheet (of newspaper) for the funeral arrangements might also be said to prefigure the makeshift funeral sheet that is placed over the dead woman’s face in the second stanza: where ‘once’ (a stinging word, that) the woman embroidered fantails on the sheet, now she, hardly able to fly away, is draped unceremoniously in it. But the speaker of the poem is adamant: ‘Let be [i.e. reality] be finale of seem [i.e. illusion]’.
Rather than dress up the funeral in false and insincere trappings and details, show things the way they actually are, after all. Life will go on after this woman’s death, so there’s no point the women dressing up and putting on a show of mourning. The flowers will soon be as irrelevant as last month’s newspapers, so one may as well wrap the former in the latter.
Similarly, in that second stanza, leave the woman’s feet poking out, the sheet not long enough to cover them. We should be prepared to face up to the realities of death and to confront the physicality of a dead body, warts (or bunions) and all. In this interpretation of the poem, so much is clear. But where does this leave us with the emperor of ice-cream?
Given that the poem begins with a call for ice-cream to be made into sexually erotic ‘curds’, it’s possible that Wallace Stevens intends for the ‘emperor of ice-cream’ to be interpreted as a symbol for life itself: the realities of life with its lust and desire and transience. It may even be that this ‘emperor’ is the one who speaks the commands in the poem’s two stanzas.
The only emperor, then, the only ruler who has a sovereign claim on us, is the one that stands for ice-cream: life, desire, feeling, as well as joy and celebration (ice cream being associated with summer holidays among other things).
But what complicates this is the coldness of ice-cream, which, given the coldness of the dead woman’s body in the second stanza, raises the spectre of death: is the emperor of ice-cream a symbol of life or death? Death, after all, is the one who holds court at all funerals.
Has the Grim Reaper traded in his scythe for a Mr Whippy van? Is that repeated line supposed to be haunting rather than celebratory: the only master who matters is the one who claims all of us – Death himself?
The poem remains an elusive and enigmatic one, and this analysis can only go so far towards raising some of the key questions (or what we view as key questions; others may differ). Who do you think the ‘emperor of ice-cream’ is? And what is Wallace Stevens saying about death?
The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History
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I think the emperor of ice cream is death. That is consistent with the rest o the poem
Lovely interpretation. What always occurs to me is that ice cream melts, just as our lives do.
I encountered this poem in a book by Stephen King — possibly Salem’s Lot — and have wondered about its meaning on and off since then. Thanks for an apt analysis.
The poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream” written by Stevens amazes with the variety of readers’ interpretations of the stanzas describing the wake of the pleasure-seeking woman.
My critical essay on this poem: https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-emperor-of-ice-cream/
I think there many ways to interpret this poem because it is told from the perspective of three different narrators, or rather, three different places in the narrator’s life as they look back on their past and think about the funeral they attended as a child. How, as a young person they had felt guilty and shame in their excitement for ice cream, even as they were supposed to be somberly mourning the death of their relative, perhaps a mother or a grandmother. How too, they recalled the person who made the ice cream and the anticipation they felt, which they relate to sexual shame (because it is vivacious anticipatory pleasure secretly felt at the notion of what will come to pass, the very antithesis of death).
How innocently they lived and though they saw their loved one and saw the dresser where they had watched them knit with skill in life which stuck in the mind’s eye of the young observer because it had missing knobs which were also glass, and perhaps as a young child they had been scared and ashamed of that horror and revulsion, which though instinctual would also be shameful because it showed an apparent disrespect for the dead, they saw this but that complex feeling was one they couldn’t process and the memory of the sweet ice cream wiped all but the vestige.
Then we see things from the perspective of an older person, perhaps in their middle years, as their health begins to deteriorate for the first time in a meaningful way, as they experience the loss of other loved ones and they begin to reexamine death and that curious memory. They reevaluate the shame they once felt, the secret pleasure and the way that it had been a kind of precursor to how they would feel about their sexuality. A mixture, no less sweet, of anticipation, shame, and a lust for life.
Perhaps with distance and as the passing of years brought more meaning to trade and life felt more blows to the innocent notions of propriety, youth, and societal norms they reevaluate that shame.
Perhaps they had lived hiding who they were and as they evaluated whether their was any point when life was short and death a certainty, they asked themselves? What really holds meaning? The only answer was to let go of pretence and enjoy life even as it might be strange, scary, shaming or even filthy and lustful. Because life wasn’t going to become cleaner, because life was for the living and because only death was a certainty. Just as the ice cream is made, and the waiting is just as wonderful as the eating, so too the ice cream melts. Good things end, people die and you don’t get to see them again, except their unfortunate shell, while you are alive.
Live without regret.
This summation is the last perspective. It is the narrator having come to grips with their grief, their shame, their fear and their lust. They are saying; don’t waste your time or your life living to please others while the joy, the ice cream, melts and goes away.
In the end, the only thing that makes up for life’s many cruelties; the only thing that sweetens the indignity of death is the moment, how we feel about it, to what extent we enjoy it and how much we respect that it is fleeting.
This is what it means to me.
The Emperor is the one who rules over life (muscular, cream, concupiscent, dawdle, flowers, fantails, horny) and death (ice, funeral, finale, cover her face, how cold she is, and dumb).