The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Wallace Stevens(1922)
Extract
Let be be finale of seem.
Cigar rollers whip dessert in the kitchen while in the next room a dead woman lies with her horny feet protruding from a sheet too short to cover them, and between these two images Wallace Stevens builds a poem that insists on the sovereignty of the sensual world over every decorative evasion. Published in 1922, this short lyric moves with the compressed authority of a manifesto. The emperor of the title is not a person but a principle: the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream, the irreducible fact of bodily pleasure and bodily decay. Stevens commands us to let the lamp affix its beam, to look without flinching at what is. The poem is a small, bright refusal of all the beautiful lies we drape over mortality.
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Keats confronts the same tension between beauty and death, but freezes it on the urn where Stevens lets the ice cream melt.
Auden makes the same observation about death and indifference, but the tone is wry where Stevens is imperious.
Auden's grief poem is the emotional version of what Stevens treats philosophically: death arrives and the world goes on.