Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice Cream"
Wallace Stevens' great poem "The Emperor of Ice Cream," which I read to you in class Wednesday, is online in many places, for example here.
And here is an excellent set of commentaries on the poem. Note especially, at the top, Helen Vendler's narrative explication of what (apparently) is going on.
When I was an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina, my 20th-century American literature professor, the great David Cowart, paraphrased "Let be be finale of seem" as "Let that which Is put an end to that which Seems."
To what extent any of this is relative to Jeff Ford's story "The Empire of Ice Cream" and Jeff Ford's collection The Empire of Ice Cream, I leave to y'all -- for now, anyway.
And here is an excellent set of commentaries on the poem. Note especially, at the top, Helen Vendler's narrative explication of what (apparently) is going on.
When I was an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina, my 20th-century American literature professor, the great David Cowart, paraphrased "Let be be finale of seem" as "Let that which Is put an end to that which Seems."
To what extent any of this is relative to Jeff Ford's story "The Empire of Ice Cream" and Jeff Ford's collection The Empire of Ice Cream, I leave to y'all -- for now, anyway.
posted by Andy Duncan at 1:52 PM
1 Comments:
The narrator of the poem is standing on the line between acceptance of death and complacent acquiescence. He is literally in one room witnessing the fruits of the ignorance of death while in another room in the same house he is confronted with the inescapably enthralling sight of a dead woman on her bed. This stark contrast casts a critical light on the ignominious festivities taking place in the ice cream room. After all, what symbol or image in all of human experience is more powerful and more capable of shaking preconceptions than a corpse? It is the only thing we know that is absolutely final. In this existential life what true "emperors" are there? None. All we have to answer our questions about our existence are illusions, false man-made gods that offer no more true solace than ice cream.
So if "Let be be finale of seem" were to read (a little less esoteric) as "Let that which is put an end to that which Seems" as Cowart paraphrased, maybe the next line, instead of "The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream," would read, "The only truth in life is the truth of dreams."
The poem may be cryptic, but I think the narrator in it is lamenting that life is not. Our human lives are straightforward, painfully so. It is we that invent the idea and manifestations of purpose.
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