The Emperor of Ice Cream

(Note: This post has been edited as of 4:54 AM Eastern on 14 Dec, to correct a prior omission, and for clarity.)

At a suggestion of mine, weblogger Aaron Haspel of God Of The Machine some time ago took a crack at an analysis of Wallace Stevens's cryptic poem, The Emperor of Ice Cream. Unlike Aaron, I'm no student of poetry, and in point of fact have a fairly well entrenched aversion to much of it, especially the postmodern sort, most of which of my experience is little more than ordinary (as in pedestrian) prose masquerading on the page as poetry by being printed in short lines, and broken up into arbitrary "stanzas."

Such, however, is not the case with Steven's superb and enigmatic Emperor, and my lack of qualification notwithstanding, I'd like to take issue with Aaron's reading of the poem, and with part of his method of analysis.

First, the text of the poem in full:

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.

My disagreement with Aaron's method is on a general point of approach to poetic analysis. Aaron recommends "pillaging the poet's life and work, should it prove useful," and then declares, "Here [i.e., with this poem] it does."

But as this poem is a genuine work of art, such an approach is not only not useful, but can lead the reader to a central misunderstanding as it did, in my opinion, Aaron, which misunderstanding will, I think, become apparent at the conclusion of this brief examination. More generally, such an approach is always a cardinal error in the analysis of any genuine work of art. Such an approach is rarely if ever enlightening, and often times positively misleading, as in this case. As I've several times elsewhere on this weblog asserted, genuine works of art are always self-contained in the sense that they contain within themselves everything necessary for their understanding, even when alluding or pointing to something outside themselves to convey or capture meaning.

And so it is with Emperor.

To continue with Aaron's reading, he next — again putting into practice his analytic method, and guided by its finding that "Stevens was a wealthy and cultivated man" — declares his objection to what he sees as Stevens's use of "imperative tense."

[T]he poem is snobbish: Stevens invites the reader to sneer at the characters of the poem as from a hill. It is written entirely in the imperative, except for the last line of each stanza, to some unspecified hearer. Imperative tense, used this way, enforces distance: when the boxing announcer says "Let's get ready to ruuuumble!" you can be sure that you (or he) won't be doing any rumbling, personally. Stevens takes special pains to remove himself, and his reader, from the scene, the better to hold his nose.

"Imperative tense"? But there is no imperative tense here. Rather, the entire poem employs the rhetorical device of exhortative apostrophe, giving the work a compelling force, weight, and urgency it would otherwise lack. The rhetoric is elevated, but is absent so much as a trace of "snobbish[ness]" or nose-holding.

And what for Aaron is the poem's central meaning? Still following his analytic method, Aaron concludes:

[Stevens] knew Key West well, which is probably where this poem takes place, since ice-cream was commonly served at funerals. His poetry has a single theme: hedonism. For Stevens all is illusion but immediate sensation. "Let be be finale of seem" means "Abandon all effort to give meaning to existence, and take what comfort you can from the roiling life around you. [...] The Emperor of Ice-Cream essentially inverts ars longa, vita brevis, the embroidered sheet being literally too short to serve even as a proper shroud. Vita, if we translate it loosely as animal vitality, is what lasts. Truth resides with the wenches, the muscular roller, the big cigars, and the concupiscent curds. In the idiom of the seventh line, be trumps seem. "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. "

Well, perhaps. It's not at all unreasonable.

But let's now do some abandoning of our own by abandoning Aaron's method altogether, and letting the poem speak for itself entirely.

The first thing that arrests one's attention is the striking duality embodied in the poem's two-stanza totality; the duality of Eros and Thanatos, of Life and Death, existentially (and psychoanalytically) considered. The unrestrained libidinous exuberance of lines 1-3 of the first stanza:

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

in resonant and polar opposition to the ashen morbidity of lines 4-6 of the second:

And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.

And then the homely details of ordinary life and custom at this homely and ordinary wake: of the living in lines 4-6 of the first stanza:

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

and of the dead in lines 1-3 of the second:

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once

And then the kickers; first, in the closing two lines of the first stanza:

Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

and last, in the closing two lines of the second:

Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

both of which closing couplets refer to the same thing.

Nowhere can be heard anything "snobbish" in any of this. It's all rather a fundamentally human, even humane, celebration of life itself; elevated in its rhetoric, but very much down to earth in its sentiment.

So, what, then, centrally is this enigmatic poem about, and what is it telling us when permitted to speak for itself unencumbered by any consideration of its author's history, which history is always irrelevant to a genuine work of art?

We're at a wake. But despite what a wake is (the "seems"), it's not death — which is an ending — that should be our concern, the poem appears to be saying, but the Will to the here and now (the "be," which is always a beginning); the here and now of vital, superabundant, ongoing life with its "concupiscent curds", which Will should always be "the finale of [every] seems," even a seems such as this, and on which Will the "lamp" (i.e., the sun; emblematic of life, and negator of death) should "affix its beam," so that we may the more radiantly behold that Will is truly "the only emperor...the emperor of ice cream," which is to say the life force itself in all its rich and overflowing concupiscent yumminess.

As I've said, a celebration of life, and a roadmap out of the darkness.

Or something like that.