The Emperor Of Ice Cream - Analysis

Introduction

Wallace Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice-cream" combines earthy immediacy with a quiet, unsettling meditation on mortality and appearances. The poem's tone moves between boisterous, almost celebratory commands in the first stanza and a subdued, somber acceptance in the second. This shift creates tension between life’s sensual, carnal pleasures and the cold finality of death. Stevens balances colloquial detail with a resonant closing refrain to leave a paradoxical impression.

Context and Authorial Note

Stevens, an American modernist poet, often explored imagination, reality, and the human need to make meaning. Written in the early 20th century, this poem reflects modernist concerns with irony, skepticism about grand narratives, and an emphasis on immediate sensory experience as a response to loss or uncertainty.

Themes of Mortality and Ordinary Ritual

One central theme is mortality: the second stanza depicts a dead woman "spread... so as to cover her face" with a sheet, her "horny feet" protruding, and the lamp affixing "its beam"—domestic details that insist on death’s ordinary facts. A second theme is the value of ordinary ritual and sensual life as an answer to death. The first stanza’s commands—call the cigar-roller, bid him whip concupiscent curds, let the wenches dawdle—suggest a celebratory, tactile affirmation of life’s pleasures in the face of loss. The refrain, "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream," asserts a democratic, ephemeral sovereign: pleasure, immediacy, and fleeting delights rule where pretension and permanence fail.

Imagery and Symbolism

Recurring images—food, the lamp, the sheet, and the newspaper—ground the poem in a domestic, working-class setting. Ice-cream functions as a complex symbol: it is delicious, temporary, and melting, symbolizing both sensory pleasure and transience. The dresser "of deal" (inexpensive pine) and "last month's newspapers" emphasize ordinariness and the absence of luxury or ceremony. The lamp’s beam illuminating the corpse suggests plain truth rather than ritualized mystery. The poem’s ambiguous line "Let be be finale of seem" recommends authenticity over appearance, reinforcing the ice-cream emblem as a call to embrace the real, however fleeting.

Final Insight

Stevens's poem juxtaposes uninhibited celebration and stark, unemotional observation of death to argue that life's brief pleasures are the proper response to mortality. By insisting on plain, sensual detail and repeating the refrain, the poem elevates the ephemeral and everyday into a kind of sovereign wisdom: transient realities, not pomp or pretense, govern human life.