A FEW NOTES ON WALLACE STEVENS’ THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

WALLACE STEVENS

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.

1. Those described in the first verse are dissociated from the death-laden second verse: they’re not part of it. Not the surreally described muscular cigar roller, described with comical, vital, gently jibing fantastical overtones. Not the dawdling wenches dressed as they are used to. And not the boys bringing flowers, possibly in the way of courting the wenches, rolled in old newspapers. 

2. In trying to understand how these described folks relate to the gist of the poem as indicated in the repeated past line of each verse, my tentative thought is that these likely unsophisticated, opposite of posh types are presented mostly positively—though “wenches” is somewhat of a spanner. But they dawdle and seem to live as how they are. There is a progression in them from the individual somewhat surreal cigar roller to the groups of wenches and boys more plainly described, ie not fantastically. So do we have in miniature panorama both the play of the imagination in the cigar roller and a touch of verisimilitude in the other two? And if we do, then why so thematically?

3. I see the succeeding line, “Let be be finale of seem” as possibly evoking complementary meanings. The conventional reading, paraphrase, let reality—“be”—in finally to pierce appearances—“seem” makes some sense. But I think it folds into a better reading that turns on “finale”. It’s not a spear that punctures, intrudes on appearances as they are happening. It’s the culminating end of what has preceded it. It presupposes some prior thing that comes to a finale, a,culminating end, as I say, that puts what has gone before in some perspective, that gives it coherence, meaning. Which is all why I ultimately see in “finale” death after lives as variegated and panoramic in miniature as set by the three described ranging from the surreally fantastical to the nicely prosaic. Death is the “finale” of them all, regardless of their lived lives, and paradoxically is the the most real “be” there is.

4. And so all of this sets up the theme of our lives as transient contingent things as ephemeral, however momentarily sweet and pleasurable, as “ice-cream” when put against the implacability of death. We in effect govern, are the emperors of, nothing.

5. The second verse seems to me more readily understandable and I’d argue is connected to the more hard to work out first verse by the contrast between those alive in their fantastical vitality and conventional living and the corpse of the old, gnarled, dead woman who embroidered fantails on the sheet in her life that now covers her corpse. This is what life comes to when we affix the beam: vitality, the fantastical expanses of the imagination, the prosaic conventionality of dawdling wenches and boys bringing flowers, living things rolled up in “dead” old newspapers, all that we do, no matter how we’ve lived comes to the “finale” of our deaths, the most real there is that perhaps finally punctures what most seems to us, “seem”, life dissociated from the fact of death.