The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Dear Reader,

With apologies for missing last week’s installment while on vacation, this week’s newsletter will feature a piece from one of America’s most important and respected poets, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).

Born the son of wealthy lawyer, Stevens attended Harvard University for three years, worked as a journalist, and then graduated with a law degree from New York Law School. After working at a few law firms, he became successful as in-house counsel for an insurance company, which later merged with Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company (now The Hartford). He was promoted to a vice president with the company and worked there until his death. (Apocryphally, Stevens’s colleagues at the company had no idea that he was a published poet, even after he won the Pulitzer Prize.)

Stevens’s burgeoning career at an attorney meant that he didn’t publish his first collection, Harmonium, until 1923 (at the age of 44). The book didn’t sell well, but it gained the respect of numerous writers and editors. Hart Crane, another well-respected American poet, wrote to a friend after reading several poems that appeared in the volume, “There is a man whose work makes most of the rest of us quail.”

Stevens took 13 years to publish his next book, Ideas of Order, after which his writing career really gained traction. He died in 1955 and is frequently cited as the greatest American poet of his generation.

(Note: Because Stevens’s poems often resist easy reading, I’ve opted to provide the background section before the poem in this week’s edition.)

Background

Stevens’s short poem, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” appeared in Harmonium. The poem describes the wake of a woman through a series of commands—from an unknown master of ceremonies—to neighbors and friends who are busy preparing food, organizing flowers, and arranging the body for visitation.

Stevens structures the poem elliptically, with two stanzas of eight lines that both end with the same refrain.

What It Offers

I love this poem because Stevens’s language and perspective in the two stanzas are completely at odds. In the first section, we have an energetic and vitalizing vocabulary—”muscular,” “concupiscent,” “dawdle”—which he obviously relishes in. And with the emphasis on “call” and “bid,” we’re drawn in by the speaker’s commands and feel like we’re an immediate part of the ceremony, which—at this point—we don’t know is a wake. Critics have speculated that the wake in this poem may be the festive kind, traditional in some Carribean cultures that Stevens came across during frequent travels to Key West and Cuba. That interpretation makes sense, because we have ice-cream making, flower gathering, and fancy dresses; but regardless, this opening is full of life, full of itself, and richly textured.

Then comes the second stanza. We have a cheap, “deal” dresser, missing knobs. We have the calloused, “horny” feet of the dead woman. We have words like “cold” and “dumb,” and a thin covering that seems insubstantial for the occasion. This is a pretty stark picture. And the only link between the two stanzas is the repeated line: “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”

What should we make of this statement? Is the ice cream a metaphor for the dead body (cold, spoiling), for the ceremony itself (sweet, indulgent), or for something else entirely? And how should we interpret the assertion that it’s the “only emperor?”

My read is that Stevens uses the ice cream, and structures the poem, to show the simultaneous existence of life and death. Life is energetic and vital, but also fleeting. The poem’s participants, the flowers, the (already out-of-date) newspapers, the dresses, and the dresser—all are in a state of transition in the poem, from life to death, from creation to consumption, from warm muscles to cold skin. This is the “only emperor” Stevens sees, the “be” that is the endpoint of artifice. In any given present, we are all living and dying.

While there’s certainly a way to take that point negatively, I think the ice cream has an optimistic connotation. After all, ice cream is a sensuous, delicious treat, almost childlike—light and fun. My read is that Stevens is telling us that everything is ephemeral, so we should eat our ice cream, wear our nice dresses, pick our pretty flowers, and engage with our celebratory traditions. “Your meal is melting,” Stevens seems to say. So we should eat up, in that hungry and exuberant fashion that is unoccupied with “seem.”

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