The Finale of Seem: Physical and Spiritual in 'The Emporer of Ice Cream'
I wrote this for a Modern Poetry class. In the original titles are italicized and italics are used for emphasis. I'll add them at some point, but I'm too tired right now XD
English 466
December 14, 2010
The Finale of Seem: Physical and Spiritual in “The Emperor of Ice Cream”
Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream” is a poem which must be considered line by line, word by word, and thought out. It may not be immediately apparent, for example, that the poem takes place at a wake. The clues must be picked up and put together. The woman’s face is covered, her feet protruding, “horny.” She is “cold” and “dumb.” Of course these are signs of death, but they come at the end of the piece and the poem must be re-read before the first stanza’s meaning is made clear. Suddenly the story told in the poem is obvious: a dead, probably impoverished (her dresser is missing its knobs) woman is lying with her feet out while in the next room the people who are supposed to be mourning her throw a party. But what of the repeated line “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream”? As with many modernist texts, this initial read is only the beginning. Understanding the story Stevens tells is the first part. Receiving his message is the second. The meaning behind the scene presented in the poem (along with the repeated line) is related to the juxtaposition of the physical and the spiritual, how each may be integral to the other, and how the only things of significance are those intangible things.
The first stanza of the piece is largely concerned with food, activity and sexuality: physical things. We are immediately introduced to a “roller of big cigars, / The muscular one” who is bid whip “concupiscent curds.” The very next line contains “wenches” dawdling in their every day attire. It is only subtly sexual unless the meaning of “concupiscent” is known (“eagerly desirous” and “lustful”), but the sexual undertones are there. The other room (in the second stanza) is utterly devoid of activity. It is just a woman lying dead with only a cloth which is too short to cover her body. There aren’t even knobs on her dresser, an indication that she is impoverished. The last two lines shed a spotlight on the woman: “Let the lamp affix its beam. / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream” (Stevens).
The key to this poem is what is there and what is not there. The glass knobs, possibly decorative or somehow aesthetically pleasing, are missing from the dresser. The woman’s life has also been lost. Ice cream may be included in this list as it is something which is, but soon is not. Ice cream melts or is eaten. It is sweet for a time, and then it is gone. If you try to keep it, it melts away to nothing, wasted.
R. Viswanathan compares this imagery to a scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which the titular figure speaks of Polonius as dead and consumed by worms, another juxtaposition of death and eating, the intangible and the physical. “Stevens’s emperor is….ice cream, which embodies an evanescent paradise, or more precisely, the principle that the unreal is composed from the ingredients of the real.” Ice cream is both tangible and intangible at the same time. It contains real things such as milk and sugar, “but ice cream’s chilled flavor has something unreal about it. This ‘unreality’ is evanescent in the sense that if ice cream is not consumed instantly, its ingredients melt back….to reality” (Viswanathan).
Poetry itself is also a tangible thing with essential intangible qualities. Writer Jaimie Crawford compares the very poem in its unanswered questions and puzzles to ice cream, saying Stevens “tempts the readers to enter a world in which reality is neither what it seems to be nor what it appears to seem.” She elaborates:
“Stevens’s poem succeeds primarily because it fails to answer the very question it asks; long after we have finished reading its words, the poem’s dialogue continues. The paradox of the emperor’s iimperious but impermanent reign - the emphasis on his supreme reign of ‘ice cream,’ his omnipotence in a 16-lin poem -- implies Stevens’s examination of the ability of poetry.” (Crawford)
In his critique of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” John Dolan explores how the poem uses the structural device of disjunction (the physical and tangible) to express the failure of many elegy poems. “Stevens uses antithesis at several levels to awaken the reader to the contradictions of the ‘Country Churchyard’ elegy. At all of these levels, the antithesis is meant to force the reader to see the impossibility of the enterprise.” He explains further how the poem’s purpose is “to expose the essential contradiction of the self-centered elegy: the poet’s display of emotion over a death which took place (or is taking place) far away among people unknown to the poet” (Dolan). In this way, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” serves as a piece against poets who would write elegies for the sake of adding to their portfolio of poems rather than out of a desire to actually honor the dead. The physical aspects of a poem are present, but the feeling behind it, the spiritual, is absent.
The position of Emperor is also a largely symbolic state, but the effect of his power and authority are real. He has the ability to rule a country and a people based solely on birthright, not through feats exemplifying why he is worthy of the position (let alone through legitimate election). Even emperors who obtain the position through conquest have merely seized a symbolic state. They lack the blood ties to point to as evidence of their right to power. But with this symbolic authority comes martial power with which to enforce it. Another example of tangible and intangible mixed together. However, the poem tells us that “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” The emperors of kingdoms and places are meaningless next to this mythic ruler of cold creamy confections. Why does the poem say this? Because those emperors are going to one day be as dead as the poor woman.
Every tangible thing is going to be lost or melt or die. The only meaning can be found in the things that can’t even be held, because they never pretend to be anything but what they are: intangible. Meanwhile they contain a spiritual meaning which a merely tangible thing is worthless without. The flurry of activity at the supposed wake with the boys bringing wenches flowers and the muscled man beating curds and the sexual undertones is all meaningless. The boys and the wenches will not always be young and desirable. The muscled man will lose his virility. The flowers will wither. They will all die and perhaps they will be as mourned as the woman in the next room. She, however, is real even though what makes her herself has passed from the world. She is real because that spiritual thing had been there before going. It is like poetry. Poetry is made up of feeling and emotion as much as it is made up of words. When a poet writes an elegy for the sake of writing an elegy without regard for the person who has died, the feeling is not there. Only the words are there, words which are gone once they are spoken and out of mind once they are read. We must “Let be.” It is like ice cream. You enjoy it while you have it and make it real through your experience of it. You feel these things, have them for a moment, and then they are gone. But for that moment, they were genuine, never pretending that they could last. You can’t hold them or keep them or eat them, but they are the real.
Works Cited
Crawford, Jaime. “Stevens’s ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream.’” Explicator 57.1 (1998): 40. Academic Search Premier, EBSCO. Web. 7 Dec. 2010.
Dolan, John. “A Refusal to Mourn: Stevens and the Self-Centered Elegy.” Journal of Modern Literature 21.2 (1998). EBSCO. Web. 8 Dec. 2010.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print.
Visiwanathan, R. “Stevens’s ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream.’” Explicator 50.2 (1992): 84. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 7 Dec. 2010.
English 466
December 14, 2010
The Finale of Seem: Physical and Spiritual in “The Emperor of Ice Cream”
Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream” is a poem which must be considered line by line, word by word, and thought out. It may not be immediately apparent, for example, that the poem takes place at a wake. The clues must be picked up and put together. The woman’s face is covered, her feet protruding, “horny.” She is “cold” and “dumb.” Of course these are signs of death, but they come at the end of the piece and the poem must be re-read before the first stanza’s meaning is made clear. Suddenly the story told in the poem is obvious: a dead, probably impoverished (her dresser is missing its knobs) woman is lying with her feet out while in the next room the people who are supposed to be mourning her throw a party. But what of the repeated line “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream”? As with many modernist texts, this initial read is only the beginning. Understanding the story Stevens tells is the first part. Receiving his message is the second. The meaning behind the scene presented in the poem (along with the repeated line) is related to the juxtaposition of the physical and the spiritual, how each may be integral to the other, and how the only things of significance are those intangible things.
The first stanza of the piece is largely concerned with food, activity and sexuality: physical things. We are immediately introduced to a “roller of big cigars, / The muscular one” who is bid whip “concupiscent curds.” The very next line contains “wenches” dawdling in their every day attire. It is only subtly sexual unless the meaning of “concupiscent” is known (“eagerly desirous” and “lustful”), but the sexual undertones are there. The other room (in the second stanza) is utterly devoid of activity. It is just a woman lying dead with only a cloth which is too short to cover her body. There aren’t even knobs on her dresser, an indication that she is impoverished. The last two lines shed a spotlight on the woman: “Let the lamp affix its beam. / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream” (Stevens).
The key to this poem is what is there and what is not there. The glass knobs, possibly decorative or somehow aesthetically pleasing, are missing from the dresser. The woman’s life has also been lost. Ice cream may be included in this list as it is something which is, but soon is not. Ice cream melts or is eaten. It is sweet for a time, and then it is gone. If you try to keep it, it melts away to nothing, wasted.
R. Viswanathan compares this imagery to a scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which the titular figure speaks of Polonius as dead and consumed by worms, another juxtaposition of death and eating, the intangible and the physical. “Stevens’s emperor is….ice cream, which embodies an evanescent paradise, or more precisely, the principle that the unreal is composed from the ingredients of the real.” Ice cream is both tangible and intangible at the same time. It contains real things such as milk and sugar, “but ice cream’s chilled flavor has something unreal about it. This ‘unreality’ is evanescent in the sense that if ice cream is not consumed instantly, its ingredients melt back….to reality” (Viswanathan).
Poetry itself is also a tangible thing with essential intangible qualities. Writer Jaimie Crawford compares the very poem in its unanswered questions and puzzles to ice cream, saying Stevens “tempts the readers to enter a world in which reality is neither what it seems to be nor what it appears to seem.” She elaborates:
“Stevens’s poem succeeds primarily because it fails to answer the very question it asks; long after we have finished reading its words, the poem’s dialogue continues. The paradox of the emperor’s iimperious but impermanent reign - the emphasis on his supreme reign of ‘ice cream,’ his omnipotence in a 16-lin poem -- implies Stevens’s examination of the ability of poetry.” (Crawford)
In his critique of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” John Dolan explores how the poem uses the structural device of disjunction (the physical and tangible) to express the failure of many elegy poems. “Stevens uses antithesis at several levels to awaken the reader to the contradictions of the ‘Country Churchyard’ elegy. At all of these levels, the antithesis is meant to force the reader to see the impossibility of the enterprise.” He explains further how the poem’s purpose is “to expose the essential contradiction of the self-centered elegy: the poet’s display of emotion over a death which took place (or is taking place) far away among people unknown to the poet” (Dolan). In this way, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” serves as a piece against poets who would write elegies for the sake of adding to their portfolio of poems rather than out of a desire to actually honor the dead. The physical aspects of a poem are present, but the feeling behind it, the spiritual, is absent.
The position of Emperor is also a largely symbolic state, but the effect of his power and authority are real. He has the ability to rule a country and a people based solely on birthright, not through feats exemplifying why he is worthy of the position (let alone through legitimate election). Even emperors who obtain the position through conquest have merely seized a symbolic state. They lack the blood ties to point to as evidence of their right to power. But with this symbolic authority comes martial power with which to enforce it. Another example of tangible and intangible mixed together. However, the poem tells us that “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” The emperors of kingdoms and places are meaningless next to this mythic ruler of cold creamy confections. Why does the poem say this? Because those emperors are going to one day be as dead as the poor woman.
Every tangible thing is going to be lost or melt or die. The only meaning can be found in the things that can’t even be held, because they never pretend to be anything but what they are: intangible. Meanwhile they contain a spiritual meaning which a merely tangible thing is worthless without. The flurry of activity at the supposed wake with the boys bringing wenches flowers and the muscled man beating curds and the sexual undertones is all meaningless. The boys and the wenches will not always be young and desirable. The muscled man will lose his virility. The flowers will wither. They will all die and perhaps they will be as mourned as the woman in the next room. She, however, is real even though what makes her herself has passed from the world. She is real because that spiritual thing had been there before going. It is like poetry. Poetry is made up of feeling and emotion as much as it is made up of words. When a poet writes an elegy for the sake of writing an elegy without regard for the person who has died, the feeling is not there. Only the words are there, words which are gone once they are spoken and out of mind once they are read. We must “Let be.” It is like ice cream. You enjoy it while you have it and make it real through your experience of it. You feel these things, have them for a moment, and then they are gone. But for that moment, they were genuine, never pretending that they could last. You can’t hold them or keep them or eat them, but they are the real.
Works Cited
Crawford, Jaime. “Stevens’s ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream.’” Explicator 57.1 (1998): 40. Academic Search Premier, EBSCO. Web. 7 Dec. 2010.
Dolan, John. “A Refusal to Mourn: Stevens and the Self-Centered Elegy.” Journal of Modern Literature 21.2 (1998). EBSCO. Web. 8 Dec. 2010.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print.
Visiwanathan, R. “Stevens’s ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream.’” Explicator 50.2 (1992): 84. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 7 Dec. 2010.