A FURTHER NOTE ON WALLACE STEVENS’ POEM THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM

 Further to the immediately below blog post.

As written to someone: 

We don’t need poems to teach us anything. In speaking of the “moral” of the story of a poem, moral means to say that reducing a poem to its theme results in some bland homily. This is btw part of what Susan Sontag meant by “Against interpretation”, evading sensuousness.

In The Emperor of Ice Cream that “moral” is something like, we at best in life only enjoy, are the emperors of only, brief transient pleasures gone once had, and which are all a prelude to our finale, death. Other lyrical poems of course offet other bland meanings. 

To get the power of good poems, then, what makes them compelling, is to understand how they accomplish what they say. That requires analysis of the parts; and best is judicious analysis, which will be, as Frye says, proportionate to the work. 

What remains elusive for me is the ultimate attitude the speaker—which is to say, what Stevens wants to say via the speaker—towards this bland moral. 

Austin Allen is right to trace the poem’s fantastical rollicking beginning—the muscular man who rolls cigars consigned to whip up kitchen cup concupiscent curds—through to the comparatively prosaic dawdling wrenches and boys bringing flowers to sardonic, black humour  starkness of the corpse with her horny feet possibly protruding, showing her cold and dumb, in exemplification of the finale awaiting us all. 

The thought strikes me just now in the very process of writing this note that this general movement in the poem from the vital fantasticality of its first few lines to the comparatively prosaic dawdling wenches and flower-bringing boys—the flowers by the way rolled up in “dead” as in dated  newspapers—and to the black humour sardonicism of the corpse, a old woman, cold and dumb in death, who embroidered fantails, perhaps standing for art, now covered by her work. So the poem’s movement is the exemplification of, which is to say, enacts its own theme. And so we get this poem’s illumination of what it says life is and what it comes to, a finale that mocks us all, which, come to think of it, is a concise iteration of some of Austin Allen’s analysis.

And I’ll note that this account or the poem can encompass the view that the first stanza is the beginning of preparations for the funeral or is that it presents a miniature panorama of lived life.

So I do believe that in the very process of composing this note I’ve come to terms with its mocking, sardonic attitude to its “moral”.

P.S. I 100% dissociate myself from Austin Allen saying that the message of the seems to be live each moment of   life to the fullest. 

P.P.S. I don’t read *in this poem* Stevens’ adjacency of life in its vitality and more prosaic part beside death such that the former is valued. I read him saying that the finale casts its shadow over all that comes before. In an earlier discussion I noted that “finale” in “let be be the finale of seem” was that greater reality over all that comes before, a kind of seeming, life itself as a kind of seeming. If this view holds, then I say the black humour sardonicism at the end brackets or qualifies what’s in the first stanza. However I can see the argument for the view that regardless of death life is to be celebrated as the first stanza has it.