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.
Wallace Stevens explained how he came up with it:
"I went, as a neighbor, to a house to help to layout the corpse of an
old woman who had died alone; I was helping to prepare for the home
wake. I entered, familiarly, not by the front door but by the
kitchen door. I was shocked and repelled as I went into the kitchen
by the disorderly festival going on inside: a big muscular neighbor
who worked at the cigar-factory had been called in to crank the ice-
cream machine, various neighbors had sent over their scullery-girls
to help out and their yard-boys bearing newspaper-wrapped flowers
from their yards to decorate the house and the bier: the scullery-
girls were taking advantage of the occasion to dawdle around the
kitchen and flirt with the yard-boys, and they were all waiting
around to have a taste of the ice-cream when it was finished. It all
seemed to me crude and boisterous and squalid and unfeeling in the
house of the dead- all that appetite, all that concupiscence.
Then I left the sexuality and gluttony of the kitchen and went in to
the death in the bedroom. The corpse of the old woman was lying
exposed on the bed. My first impulse was to find a sheet to cover
the corpse; I went to the cheap old pine dresser, but it was hard to
get the sheet out of it because each of the three drawers was
lacking a drawer-pull; she must have been too infirm to get to the
store to get new glass knobs. But I got a sheet out, noticing that
she had hand-embroidered a fantail border on it; she wanted to make
it beautiful, even though she was so poor that she made her own
sheets, and cut them as minimally as she could so as to get as many
as possible out of a length of cloth. She cut them so short, in
fact, that when I pulled the sheet up far enough to cover her face,
it was too short to cover her feet. It was almost worse to have to
look at her old calloused feet than to look at her face; somehow her
feet were more dead, more mute, than her face had been.
She is dead, and the fact cannot be hidden by any sheet. What
remains after death, in the cold light of reality, is life-all of
that life, with its coarse muscularity and crude hunger and greedy
concupiscence, that is going on in the kitchen. The only god of this
world is the cold god of persistent life and appetite; and I must
look steadily at this repellent but true tableau-the animal life in
the kitchen, the corpse in the back bedroom. Life offers no other
tableau of reality, once we pierce beneath appearances."
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