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Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent cur .........
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Wallace Stevens
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| Comments about this poem (The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens) |
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Click here to write your comments about this poem (The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens)
Zaineb Alsaygh (4/2/2008 8:57:00 AM)
oh yonoos you make me hungry
i do like ice-cream
ohhhhhhh! ! ! ! ! my stomach crying because of you
thax alot
yours |
Kim Schnare (2/14/2008 1:12:00 PM)
A commentary on how members of a society honor their dead, The Emperor of Ice Cream allows the reader's personal opinon to dictate how they interpret the lines. It was written from the distant, omniscient angle revealed in the last line of each stanza, but frequently makes use of a wonderfully convertable, imperative, second-person viewpoint. This allows statements like “let the wenches dawdle in such dress / As they are used to wear, ” be taken as contemptuous OR permissive. The intent of the poem is to provoke an analysis, to get the reader to look closely at the attitude of the men and women who gather to pay their last respects.
The street “roller of big cigars” is given the task of serving ice cream, a food associated with things like triviality, brievity, sensuality, and the notion of carpe diem. This 'emperor of ice cream' then becomes a central figure in the dead woman's wake (funereal gathering) , to whom the wenches and boys who brought “flowers in last month's newspapers” keep coming back and back. Line 7 encapsluates the first stanza. It suggests (but does not confirm) a 'permissive' attitude towards the festivities, stating that what is happening now is the best course of action, and that this frivolty in the presence of death is concurrent with the reality that life goes on. It suggests that honest ice cream is more respectful than a crowd of somber black-clad mourners doing what is socially expected while wishing for flirtation and fun.
The woman lying covered in a self-embroidered sheet either doesn't care how her neighbors/family react to her death, or is unable to protest. The 'three glass knobs' missing from the dresser in her room imply either simple impoverishment or post-mortem burglary. Line 15 is a summarization of the poem's theme, written from that interchangeable second-person viewpoint. The lamp light is a metaphor for the mental focus of society and the individual, whose attention needs to be replaced on the tragedy of death and discount the magic of life. Or vice versa. |
J T Hutcherson (12/8/2007 8:33:00 PM)
I've always loved this poem, for what it has to say, for how it was written and even the fact that it took me a long time to get into it, though the message is pretty straight forward. Maybe it was the vocabulary. I've been fascinated by it from the first reading.
Anyhow, with the opening line, 'Call... The muscular one... concupiscent [lustful] curds...', I think Stevens is saying that life is grounded in the physical, and not only that, but also that we are driven and ruled by the yearning, pursuit and satisfaction of our desires, especially the physical ones.
In fact, despite all of our history and great political movements and civilized accomplishments ('flowers wrapped in last months newspapers') , these simple needs and desires, even biological concerns, are at the core of everything we do. 'The emperor of ice cream' is simple desire personified, desire on an instinctual level. All this hustle and bustle, love and want of love, or just the attainment of a more extravagant luxury, this is life and it's who we are. 'Be (reality) ' really is the 'finale of seem'.
Furthermore, I think Stevens admires the hustle and bustle of humanity going about its various pursuits. In the second stanza Stevens is confirming that being driven by desire is as it should be, because without desire life is cheap furniture like a 'dresser of deal', cold and colorless like dead flesh. In this funeral scene the only things to be noted with interest are the
'embroidered fantails' on a sheet that the deceased had tried to make more beautiful, more desirable.
'Let the lamp affix its beam, ' you can dress it up or look at it directly under the cold, bright lamp of the mortician, but in the end death is of little consequence. There is nothing in death, nothing to long for, nothing to admire. |
Not a member No 4 (3/4/2007 2:50:00 PM)
I should have passed this by I fear, but never mind.
The name attracted and having read it I now as always feel compelled to stick something in the box. I have no prior knowledge of Stevens or this poem, so all of this will be shot in the dark stuff.
My first impression - I will probably come back to this when I've had a closer look at Stevens and the poem and no doubt delet this comment - is that the Emperor of Ice Cream is death - cold, very! Who makes cold like death? Pretty obvious you'll say, but I've got to work my way in by little steps. The implication of that interpretation is clear enough. Assumption of status, wealth, power, whatever is vain, transient and fragile. (Clear echoes of Gray of course) .
The first 3 lines enact that implication by reducing wealth and power to kitchen duties (big cigar and muscular) , and quite dismissively too, by use of the word 'bid' line 2.
All men and women are then assigned their roles in life, in the figures of boys and wenches. Some elaboration of the roles he attributes and his perspective on them is no doubt contained in the images - but these do not appear to threaten this interpretation at this stage.
He then reconciles a major philosophical question, the problem of appearance and 'reality' by making rational/sound 'seeming' the equivalent of reality - a good enough reality for us to work with being the implication - and thereby bridges the gap that Hume, Kant et al couldn't or wouldn't (though Rand was happy to and did it convincingly with ease) .
The purpose of stanza 1 in my view is to set the scene with reductionist - though very persuasive - abstractions carried by simplified images.
Stanza 2 is the concrete, the reality, in the form of an actual death furnished poetically with its grim details - the lamp being used as a device enable us to see clearly that yes in the final analysis death has no rivals in the power stakes.
Perhaps a perverse take. Probably a perverse take, based on too little considered study. I'll have another shot later once I've done a little spade work. |
Gary Witt (12/8/2006 5:17:00 PM)
In the past few weeks I've read several attempts to explain this poem on a literal level; most by very erudite people, but none very satisfying. They all seem extremely artificial to me.
It seems to me the only way this poem truly makes sense is if I view the opening stanza as taking place after a funeral, and the second stanza as taking place in preparation for the funeral, as a sort of flashback if you will.
I don't have any support for this view in the text of the poem itself. But then, flashbacks rarely announce themselves. Moreover, I don't know of any culture or locale in which the wake precedes preparation of the body for burial. However, that may simply be a result of my own ignorance.
In the first stanza, it seems to me, we hear the voice of someone 'in charge, ' and telling people what to do. (Get Uncle Charley to dish up the ice cream, tell the girls to change into their everyday clothes, and have the boys bring the flowers over here.) The nature of these tasks tells me that the funeral is over. People are perhaps still a little dazed by the ceremony and by the loss itself. There is an effort to get things to return somehow to normal. 'Let be be finale of seem.' The whole thing doesn't seem real. But reality will be the finale of appearance. Stop fighting it.
In the second stanza, the same person is making preparations for the funeral. (Someone go up to the dresser-the one missing the knobs-and bring down some of her linen, the sheets with the birds embroidered on it. We'll need a shroud and we don't want her feet to show. It's awfully dark in here, would you get the light?)
And throughout, the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. We have so little control over any part of our lives, we might only be an emperor of ice-cream. Still, our dreams remain lofty enough that Stevens can translate all this into a formal discourse. 'Concupiscent curds...wenches dawdle...Take from the dresser of deal...' Stevens' use of language elevates the ordinary, and celebrates the sensuous, but then bursts the bubble with 'the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.'
Part of the irony here, of course, is the fact that the voice seems to be in control of everything. But the voice is actually in control of nothing, not even whether the shroud will cover the feet of the deceased.
Stevens juxtaposes grandiloquent language with plain or even impoverished characters. But is his intent to disparage or ridicule? I don't think so. I don't take from this poem a criticism of the characters in it. They do not appear pompous or even silly. Instead I see in them an effort to maintain some sense of decorum or dignity, even though in the end we have neither. Or perhaps only the dignity we bestow upon ourselves. |
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