In the Library
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Wallace Stevens, 1922
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
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Let be be finale of seem.
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About the book
Call the roller of big cigars. The poem opens like an order shouted into a busy kitchen, and at once the room is loud with the living: a muscular man whipping concupiscent curds in cracked cups, boys hauling flowers in last month's newspaper, girls loitering in their everyday dresses. Wallace Stevens loved a word the way a child loves sugar, and he lets these consonants clatter and melt on the tongue. Then, in the cold back bedroom, a dead woman lies under a sheet she once embroidered with fantails, her horny feet protruding, in the poem's own unsparing phrase, to show how cold she is, and dumb. Set the riot of appetite against the silent corpse and ask which one rules. Stevens answers without blinking: against death there is no king and no god, only the body's hunger for sweetness while it can still taste. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.