Although the Poetry Foundation works to provide accurate audio transcripts, they may contain errors. If you find mistakes or omissions in this transcript, please contact us with details.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Pleasure and Death

(MUISC PLAYING)

Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, January 14th, 2015. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, “Pleasure and Death.” One of the most famous poems Wallace Stevens wrote is also one of his most enigmatic. “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” is just two short stanzas, yet there are lines in this very strange and fanciful poem that readers are still scratching their heads over. I'm scratching a bit less and with a lot more pleasure since I read a poem guide on “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” that's up on the Poetry Foundation's website. It's written by Austin Allen, a poet and the founding editor of Lit Genius, part of the genius.com website. He joins me from a studio in Baltimore, where he lives. Austin, it never occurred to me that ice cream itself might have meant something different to Stevens when he wrote this poem and you explain this so beautifully in your essay. What's different about ice cream perhaps in the early part of the 20th century than the way we experience it today?

Austin Allen: Well, ice cream at that point—this poem first emerges in 1922—and ice cream at that stage is still, you know, it's available. You can get it at drugstore counters and so on but it's not mass-produced in the same way that it is today.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, there's no Häagen-Dazs in the local store or something like that.

Austin Allen:
No Häagen-Dazs. No, it's a more of a rare treat.

Curtis Fox: I learned that from your essay, but I also learned something that should have occurred to me but didn't. This poem may very well be set in Florida, in the Florida Keys or in Cuba where Stevens spent a great deal of time, especially in Florida.

Austin Allen: Key West and Cuba are powerful and recurring presences and places in his poetry.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Austin Allen: Yeah, it's been speculated that the location here is either Havana or Key West, both of which are places he vacationed.

Curtis Fox: So, Austin, you would think the poem was about the Emperor of Ice Cream—that's the title of it, after all, but it is actually a funeral poem, is it not?

Austin Allen: It is, yes. It's set at a wake where there's, in one room, household servants preparing ice cream and other food for the wake, and in the second room, that we learn about in the second stanza, the corpse of an older woman.

Curtis Fox: Uh-huh. So, the poem is in two stanzas, and we don't have a recording of Stevens reading it, and he wasn't such a good reader of his own work anyway. We do, however, have a reading of the poem by the poet Sandra Gilbert. She read it for the Poetry Foundation about seven years ago. It's one of her favorite poems. Let's hear that first stanza which takes place, I guess, in the kitchen, right Austin?

Austin Allen: That's right, yep.

Curtis Fox: OK, here we go.

Sandra Gilbert:

The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens

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.

Curtis Fox: OK, so that's the first stanza, and there's a lot packed into there that I want to ask you about. “Call the roller of big cigars, / the muscular one, / and bid him whip / in kitchen cups concupiscent curds.” Alright, so who's the muscular roller of the big cigars here?

Austin Allen: Well, this is an imagined scene, and we have a speaker sort of conjuring the scene into being and the roller of big cigars would seem to be a local cigarmaker who is being asked to help prepare food for the funeral.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, so he's all strong. He's been rolling cigars everyday so he can go up and whip up the ice cream, right?

Austin Allen: That's right. Presumably, manually, someway or another.

Curtis Fox: Now, he doesn't say ice cream here, he says concupiscent curds, and you point out concupiscent is an eye-catching and gaudy word. So why did he put that word in there?

Austin Allen: Concupiscent curds, right? Concupiscent, lustful, desire, it sets a kind of a sexy tone for this first stanza. It is also very eye-catching. Stevens himself chose this poem among the poems that he had written to date in the mid-’30s as his favorite.

Curtis Fox: Really?

Austin Allen: Among his own poems. He was mid-career at that point but he said that for him it wears a commonplace costume but the poem contains something of the essential gaudiness of poetry, and that's why he liked it.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, so what does he mean by the essential gaudiness of poetry exactly, what did he mean by that? There is something show-offy about it, and kind of tacky about poetry. What does he mean by that?

Austin Allen: Maybe.

Curtis Fox: It's hard to know.

Austin Allen: Yeah, it is hard to know. If you think about this poem where the scene is in real life, it would be, you know, a fairly humble scene. This is a home wake for a woman who, based on the details we get in the second stanza, was probably not a rich woman, probably a humble lifestyle, and yet it's delivered to us in this very playful, very, in some ways, show-off, very rich language that conveys itself an attitude toward death that I think the poem is trying to embody.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, it's bid him whip, not have him whip. Bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds, the language is sort of fancy.

Austin Allen: It is, and it's the language of either, you know, a conjurer conjuring this into existence or maybe a stage director directing the scene.

Curtis Fox: And then “let the wenches dawdle in such dress / as they are used to wear, and let the boys / bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Now, that word wenches really sticks out. It's an old-fashioned word. It's often humorous, maybe Elizabethan. Why did he say wenches?

Austin Allen: Wenches picks up on concupiscent in the previous line. Wench is a somewhat archaic word that has connotations of either serving girls, as they are here, or prostitutes, and this poem, I think, is haunted by Shakespeare in a lot of ways. I hear in that wenches the voice of a kind of Shakespearean stage director saying, bring the wenches in.

Curtis Fox: Yes. Yeah, that makes sense, yes. It's like he's directing his own imaginary drama.

Austin Allen: Yeah.

Curtis Fox: And the boys bring in flowers and last month's newspapers.

Austin Allen: The flowers for the funeral.

Curtis Fox: The flowers for the funeral, and then there's this line that comes out of absolutely nowhere and is abstract where everything else is very concrete before it. “Let be be finale of seem.” I've puzzled over that for quite a while. What do you make of it?

Austin Allen: It's a complex and a much debated line. I think it's been argued as meaning something like, let reality take over from imagination or let the actual scene take over from the potential, bring this moment to its real culmination.

Curtis Fox:
Right, in other words no more fancy stuff.

Austin Allen: That's right.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, it kind of makes sense, but it's hard to puzzle that out. “Let be be finale of seems. / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” Alright, so let's go to the second stanza and into a different room. And I think stanza, the word, comes from the Italian, and it kind of means room.

Austin Allen: It does, yeah.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, so we actually literally shift stanzas and we shift rooms.

Sandra Gilbert:

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.

Curtis Fox: So, Austin, we have a body here laid out in, I guess, the bedroom, but the details are quite revealing. What do we learn about who this dead woman is?

Austin Allen: From the furniture in her house, from the dresser of deal, which is a kind of cheap pinewood lacking the three glass knobs, right? The furniture is in disrepair. This is a woman in humble circumstances, maybe even a poor woman who's laid out in her own home for her own wake.

Curtis Fox: And that sheet on which she embroidered fantails once. What is a fantail? What are the implications that she was the one who embroidered them?

Austin Allen: “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” comes from the collection Harmonium, and elsewhere in this collection, which was Stevens’s first, he makes other references to birds, to peacocks, to fantail birds, and they seem to represent for him, again, part of that kind of gaudiness of the imagination, as peacocks do. And, so, this is a sheet on which she's embroidered birds, this has been, you know, part of the art of her life and it's covering her. It's covering her body here at the end but not entirely. It's not quite sufficient.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, it's not quite long enough. And it says “if her horny feet protrude”— horny meaning kind of crusty or knobby or…

Austin Allen: Yeah, knobby, calloused.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, calloused. “They come / to show how cold she is, and dumb.” So basically, let's cover up so we don't see her face and if her feet stick out, it's only to show us how dead she is. Isn't that a fair paraphrase of that?

Austin Allen: That is a good paraphrase.

Curtis Fox: And then there's this very precise phrase: “Let the lamp affix its beam.” I can't help but notice it comes in the same place in this stanza as “let be be finale of seem” comes in the previous stanza.

Austin Allen: That's right. It parallels “let be be finale of seem” and seems to be a restatement of this idea of let's look at this scene and let's look at death in the light of cold reality.

Curtis Fox: Yet, I can understand if the poem ended right there yet the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream, that's wild. I mean, next to you, you have a dead body and then the poet asserting the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Austin Allen: That's right. The emperor of ice cream, there's no obvious emperor in this poem, so he seems to be talking about some sort of more abstract governing figure, some sort of figure or spirit that's presiding over the scene and that ice cream connects back to the household servants making ice cream in the kitchen who are having a kind of a boisterous fun time even though it is awake and there seems to be some kind of implication that ice cream, that's something that we consume and gobble up as living people and the fact that it connects to this kind of fun vibrant scene in the kitchen, those are what go on after us. Those are what preside over life and once we're dead, we're kind of out of that picture.

Curtis Fox: I always take it to mean that hedonism rules basically, that pleasure and human desire are the ultimate principles that drive human life forward even in the face of death. Is that, is that a fair reading of it?

Austin Allen: I think that's a good reading, yep. Consuming food, sex, life goes on.

Curtis Fox: But what do you make of Stevens's attitude to it? He's having a great deal of fun in this poem. You sense his pleasure in presenting the scene, but what do you think his attitude towards that reality is? Do you think he agrees with it that the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream?

Austin Allen: I do think he means it. I think he's deliberately showing us both halves of that picture giving kind of equal weight to both and showing that death in the face of that spirit of life and hedonism is a lonely, bare kind of a thing.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. And tell me, what makes it such an emblematic Stevens poem?

Austin Allen: Well, in some ways it has to do with the setting, which you discussed. The kind of New England wintry landscape and the more lush tropical landscape of places like Key West, Havana, were kind of opposite poles in Stevens's poetry, opposite poles of his imagination even. Those settings seem to come to stand in for him for vibrant life versus bare, lonely, death or ascetic kind of living and here we get a vibrant, probably Caribbean scene, but with death and coldness in its midst. And that ice cream, both in its coldness and in its fun, in the pleasure of ice cream, kind of embodies those contradictions in and of itself.

Curtis Fox: Now, one other thing I learned from your essay, which I found pretty amusing, was that Stevens had a big sweet tooth.

Austin Allen: He did. He grew pretty large as he got older.

Curtis Fox: OK Austin, thanks so much.

Austin Allen: Thanks, Curtis.

Curtis Fox: You can read Austin Allen's poem guide to “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” in the Learning Lab section of the Poetry Foundation's website. Let us know what you think of this program. Email us at [email protected]. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.