[This essay accompanies our in-depth video discussion of Wallace Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” with poet/critic Dan Schneider.]
It is all in the voice—or maybe in its emphasis. Every great poem has its own POV, though the wrong voice will diminish it. After all, good sound is measured by its meaning, and sometimes, a woman’s voice feels best for reciting “masculine” poetry. In Dana Gioia’s grim reading of Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” there is nothing left to probe. He is severe where the language is playful, entombing his analysis with guesswork every time he misses a tone. Another reading, from the archconservative Hillsdale College, is uncomfortable to watch, with a trite, melancholy piano that further damages interpretation. By contrast, the poem’s best recital is from a high school student almost twenty years ago. She is energetic, picks up on double (and overt!) meanings, and communicates this knowledge on stage. Her performance works because it does not engage the academic debate—it only speaks the words as written, which appear bigger, broader, and more festive than in the mouths of academics:
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
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.
If you’ve read our analyses of “Man Carrying Thing” and “Large Red Man Reading,” you know that Wallace Stevens likes to take off the mask. Unfortunately, he is also thought of as cold, detached, and humorless even when playful and direct. This certainly applies here, for “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” is, from the very first line, among his ‘fun’ poems. Whether or not you accept Cary Simpson’s burlesque performance, “Call the roller of big cigars” already involves three people: the speaker (who has authority to command or describe), the caller (the reader?—after all, these become his mental images), and the roller, who becomes the poem’s center. He not only rolls “big cigars,” but, despite his strength and appearance, is ordered to “whip” the “concupiscent curds”. Such sexual innuendo only multiplies with “wenches dawdle in such dress”—the “as” almost universally ignored in its secondary meaning: “because they are used to wear [and tear]…” Ending this line on “and let the boys” furthers the sexual reading, though it is also a line often cited to explain a purported funeral. The boys’ “flowers in last month’s newspapers” are thought to be sympathy bouquets, yet it was street-peddlers who most often wrapped them in newsprint. “Let be be finale of seem” invokes finality (e.g., death), but also the end of a performance, thus working up an image for both. As for the poem’s “emperor”: there is reason to believe that he is “the roller of big cigars,” and becomes “emperor” even if—as will be shown—the academic reading is accepted.
In our video analysis of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” poet Dan Schneider (author of the deepest critical essay on Wallace Stevens) argues that the first stanza does not depict a funeral, but a boardwalk, street fair, or similar, from early 20th century America. The scene is happy, freakish, and full of the suddenness of life. This only leaves the second stanza for a potential funeral, a fact that Wallace Stevens must have been aware of. The “dresser of deal,/ lacking the three glass knobs” furnishes—putting other meanings of “deal” aside—the poem’s second domestic image (“kitchen cups” being first, though “kitchen” can also describe function rather than place). “That sheet” falls heavily as the enjambed phrase, as does the sheer pastness of his next line (“On which she embroidered fantails once”), and the next: “And spread it so as to cover her face.” “Cold” and “dumb” are visceral, even corpselike, so that wherever the poem might turn, Stevens has left the reader with hints of death. Compared to the first stanza, “protruding” feet appear less sexual, as if they are an inconvenience—though “horny” brings us back to burlesque, as does “they come” (enjambed on the sexual connotation, which had been around for centuries), and especially “Let the lamp affix its beam.” Keeping this sentence as its own line draws special attention to it, so that “cold” and “dumb” is no more a dead body than an improperly living one—at least from the perspective of her suitors. Furthering this, “And spread it so as to cover her face” is not necessarily the second part of the command beginning with “Take…”, but a potential description of what she herself once did to her own face. The image now shifts from a colorful panorama to an individual being pushed into a spotlight and/or gaze (“beam”). It is like she is being selected—and not necessarily for death. And just as the poem’s refrain re-asserts the centrality of its emperor (that is, the only one who can populate the scene with such characters), the penultimate line allows the refrain itself to become sexual.
Ironically, this is an interpretation hiding in plain sight, for even the least probable readings ultimately demand it. Dana Gioia interprets the poem’s meaning without supplying his evidence. For example, “the roller of big cigars” is “probably the undertaker”—but why? How does the image comport with an undertaker in any way, much less with the next line, where this “undertaker” is tasked to “whip/ In kitchen cups concupiscent curds”? It doesn’t matter, for Gioia never was an original critic and is merely referencing all the nonsense which precedes him. His interpretation of “Let be be finale of seem” is OK, as it is one possible reading, though Gioia makes it the only one. He calls the “emperor” a “mysterious image of the delicious pleasures of life that melt away and must end with death”—one of the most prosaic readings imaginable, but alright. Let us assume, if only for the sake of argument, the academic POV. In Austin Allen’s essay on “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” he correctly calls the poem “whimsical,” thus placing himself ahead of Dana Gioia. He identifies the opening scene as a “kitchen” (interpreting “kitchen” as noun despite its purely adjectival usage) and claims “concupiscent” is an “unusual” word to apply to food, yet supplies the wrong evidence. Indeed, sexuality is a common parallel for rich foods—and it is the rarity of the word itself which elides cliché while still keeping sexuality front and center. He name-drops John Keats without reason, and quietly states (not argues) that the second stanza describes a corpse. The seemingly festive nature of the poem is explained away by referencing Wallace Stevens’s travels in the Caribbean—an annoyingly pat use of biography for literary criticism. Perhaps less importantly (because the poem has NO Caribbean imagery to speak of), there is little evidence that ice cream is a funeral tradition anywhere except in the American South. He then alludes to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, arguing that “the lives of all creatures are fragile and temporary, and all creatures obey a sovereign impulse toward hedonism—feast as much as you can while there’s still time”:
Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. (Hamlet to Claudius, Act IV, Sc. 3)
Fine—let us also assume the Hamlet connection, strained as it is. If Wallace Stevens was thinking of these lines, it still coheres better with my reading than with the academic one. If the “worm” is the “only emperor,” we simply return to phallic imagery that goes back thousands of years. Hamlet implies the continuity (if not the necessity) of procreation, whereas “curds” supply its naked image. The “only emperor” is one that creates and re-creates, with art itself a kind of ejaculation. And it is really “the roller of big cigars” who generates both scenes, inviting onlookers with a flurry of activity that gives way to one final image ending not in death, but sex. Hamlet himself is equally obsessed with both, but not Wallace Stevens. Critics have wondered who the poem’s “master of ceremonies” is, yet the simplest explanation might be Stevens himself. He witnessed the scene, as did millions of others on the Tri-State shoreline, though only he, as poet, could propagate it into this century, and the next.
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More from Alex Sheremet: SEASONAL GRUNGE: Spring & Winter in NYC on 35mm Film, ANALOG GRUNGE: Washington DC on 35mm Film, Art of Crime: Analyzing Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989)