Significance of the title the emperor of ice cream
Answers
It wouldn't matter if I got to a hundred picnics in after years; they wouldn't make up for missing this one. They're going to have boats on the Lake of Shining Waters—and ice cream, as I told you. I have never tasted ice cream. Diana tried to explain what it was like, but I guess ice cream is one of those things that are beyond imagination.
Anne’s joy transports us back to a time before Häagen-Dazs and Baskin-Robbins, a world in which household refrigeration was rudimentary and ice cream had yet to be mass-produced on a modern scale. It wasn’t “beyond imagination” for everyone—it was sold in drugstores, for example—but it was still an indulgence, not a fixture of the average kitchen.
Composed fewer than 15 years later, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” depicts a rather busy kitchen, one in which ice cream is to be “whip[ped]” up with gusto:
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.
This brief vignette is dense with imagery and short on context. “Concupiscent” seems to promise a clue: it’s an eye-catching word, a gaudy word. (Stevens once remarked that “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” captured “something of the essential gaudiness of poetry.”) It’s also an unusual word to apply to food: it means “lustful, desirous.” Stevens may have meant it to echo a sensual passage in Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” in which Porphyro piles sweets—including “jellies soother than the creamy curd”—before his beloved.
We notice that the theme of lust also extends to the “muscular” roller of “big cigars” (Stevens, like all the modernists, wrote in the shadow of Freud) and those “wenches” (which can mean female servants, as it does here, or prostitutes in other contexts) who “dawdle” around the ice cream maker and his curds. Even the boys who bring flowers evoke romance, and those dated newspapers, useful now only as wrappers, remind us of the swift passage of time—a traditional theme in poems about young love.
But how did this kitchen get so hot and heavy? Where is it located? Who are all these people? Who is conjuring up the scene? The rest of the stanza supplies none of this information; instead, it vaults into sudden abstraction:
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
The next stanza shifts abruptly to a description of a dresser and sheet, which leads up to the image of a female corpse:
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
Answer:
Wallace Stevens poem The Emperor of Ice-Cream is his most well-known.
Explanation:
The Emperor or Ice-core Cream's image is nuanced, confusing, and conflicted. The lone "emperor" is further defined as being the emperor of ice cream. Everyone in the room can clearly see that death is the natural and inevitable conclusion to life.
The enigmatic-sounding phrase is reiterated three times in the poem for emphasis, along with the title and the two refrains: "the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."
The emperor might either be alive or dead, according to these two alternative interpretations of the ice cream. Life may be sweet and perishable, but it is not chilly like ice cream, which is cold but fleeting.
If we suppose that Stevens believes in a hereafter, which he does not, then the feeling of coldness may suit death because it is chilly yet hardly fleeting.
This blending and complicating of the meaning's implications for the ice-cream image seems to imply that life and death are inextricably linked and intertwined. The emperor, whoever he may be, is more authentic than typical emperors. Ice cream represents both life and death.