The Emperor of Ice Cream

Steven Wallace

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.

• Ice cream equates to excess, luxury, desire
• It’s not necessary, unlike bread and butter
• Ice cream just icing on the cake 
• Just to enjoy and indulge 
• Decadence 
• Proletarian, common, can be afforded by most people. 
• in keeping with the register of this poem suggests ordinary people, even vulgar 
• “Wenches” means girls but of a flirtatious nature
• Sexual connotation. Ie. Women as object of desire 
• Plus, “Concupiscent” latin word, means very desirous, to long for. 
• Why use this?
• Because of the “cup” and “kitchen” sound. Very sensual. 
• Also a contrast. These people wouldn’t know this word. The muscular men wouldn’t, nor would the wenches. 
• Suggests artificial views of people
• Deflation of the pompousness
• A taking down, a sinking
• for concupiscent is used to describe “curds”
• but curds are not concupiscent themselves, but people–sexual desire.
• So people’s desires have been transferred onto an object: transferred epithet. Ie the “angry storm”

So far, the poem suggests the fundamental contrast between what ice cream symbolizes (luxury, excess) and the agents of this poem (ordinary, vulgar)

But so far this all just paratextual 

• We go into the poem with a lot of assumption
• Contextual the poem 

Redneck (muscular workers, Trump supporters?)

Pale face (more educated)

• A social order, class order, hierarchy 
• “Call the roller of big cigars, / the muscular one”

“Newspapers” and “flowers”

-ice cream, a cold, lush desert

– But wait too long and it’ll melt

• Once it melts, like any other pleasures, sex, flowers, newspapers, they are ephermal and “cold”
• The cold feet of the lady suggests that death and the pleasures of life have something in common: detachment, isolation
• Once we get a taste, it quickly disappears
• The chill of death
• Seduction in the midst of decay 

• The boys bring “newspapers from last month” but they’re no no longer relevant, 
• “Flowers” is also something that’ll die 
• All outdated
• But they are not concerned
• Social world is not relevant.
• The outdatedness of news
• Newspaper just becomes wrapping paper
• Metonymy
• Newspaper is used as wrapping papers for the flowers
• A way of recycling the materiality of their existence
• Everything can be recycled
• From frozen ice cream to melted cream
• Same thing but different forms, different states

Let be be finale of seem. 

• How we’d take something, which is not real, to be real
• “Let be” be something. A hypothetical. Ie. let x be such and such
• And let this be
• But this sense of “let be” is merely an imagination, yet this guides us to an image of reality
• An aesthetics, a pretending
• Aesthetics then becomes a way of seeming, of what reality seems to be 
• But as we pretend, we tend to become who or what we pretend
• Overtime, we get used to it and forget 
• In some ways, the genuine self is inaccessible
• I want to be that true person that I’m not
• Ones person beauty is another’s ugliness and vice versa
• Has to do with aesthetics, with pretending. We oscillate between this “let be” and that “hypothetical”
• So the solution is to come with terms with whatever it is

A formula to sum it up: The movement from “as if” to “as such”

• To let what is, be what it is
• The “emperor is the emperor of ice cream” then does not seem so absolute, powerful, for he melts, disappears, and is ephemeral. 
• He may be indeed an emperor, but he also seems part abstraction, part fairy tale. 
• In fact, he may be an allusion to the naked emperor
• The perfect embodiment of the contrast between illusory seeming and naked “being.”
• Death and pleasure are one. 
• What is is how it is.

• While there is death, life goes on. 
• It goes on despite it.
• Conversely, just because there is life, doesn’t mean that death will reserve itself. There is still death despite life.  
• But the all-powerful, imminent death is in a way, still overlaid or overshadowed by life. 

Intense coldness of ice cream, intense coldness of death

• They are on the same level 
• Each being what it is, the utmost degree of being 
• Just to be exceeds something more than being 
• If you just be, then you are not aware of yourself being 
• If you are, then you are not “be,” but being aware that you are indeed, being
• One just cannot be both aware and not aware at the same time 
• So, “merely” be is also just a paradox
• Since merely sounds like “only,” but to be is a very difficult thing to do

For the rednecks then and the young boys and girls, Stevens suggests that they are good people, that they are just being good? Amenable, truly existing. 

• The opposite, for example, ie being cultured is a sense of alienation.
• We have a distance. 
• Being cultured is a foreign condition from the plenitude, fullness of being