Be Your Own Emperor of Ice Cream!

“The Emperor of Ice-Cream” (1922)

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.

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? ma

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Upon my reading of this poem, my mind could simply not resist the urge to become excited. Maybe it’s my love of ice cream, maybe it’s the childish nature of the diction of the poem. The speaker of the poem seems confident and commanding, but almost in a whimsical way. I imagine a man, with thin legs and a ninth-month-of-pregnancy sized stomach, wearing a top hat as he grins with madness and declares that, “the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream!” However, my mind seems to ignore the rest of the poem, including words such as “wenches,” “horny feet,” and “dumb.”

Other readers of this poem were not able to ignore these crude words. This poem has often been interpreted to take place after the death of a woman. The speaker of the poem does indeed summon a “muscular” man to serve ice cream, which is…nice, but he also summons “wenches,” assumedly the female relatives of the dead woman, to bring flowers to the wake. The speaker also attempts to cover the corpse with an embroidered sheet, but the sheet fails to cover the body’s “horny” feet.

The difference in diction alone between my interpretation and the analysis of others is enough to start thinking that either I have the mind of a six-year-old watching Willy Wonka, or that the others have the minds of ravens watching the sky slowly fall down on them.

I believe it is neither. I think the main reason for viewing the poem differently all lies in your perspective. I pick and chose what stands out to me in the poem because it is what I want to believe. I want to see the innocence still sparking somewhere within the darkest of tunnels. I want to eat the strawberry-topped ice cream and ignore the blackened salmon and gravy-smothered mashed potatoes that lay in front of me.

With finals finally here and the school year coming to an end, it’s that time again: time to freak out. I hate this time of year for multiple reasons. Firstly, papers and tests suck. There is no way around it. They suck butt. Secondly, I hate seeing fellow students stress out and take Adderall (yeah, don’t deny it) and drink excessive caffeine and cry about grades that, in the long run, will not affect your overall quality of life.

I’m not telling you to disregard your research paper on the placebo effect and its impact on depression patients. I’m simply stating that we should definitely try our hardest and do what we can in order to succeed, but not to let those late nights at Mugar completely dictate our overall happiness.

I hope I don’t get a rock through my window because of this column. Don’t hate me, please. I recognize that yes, how you do in college is important to what you will accomplish in “the real world” and yes, if you can’t make money you can’t buy food. However, all you lucky BU students, I hope we can take some odd form of pride in the fact that we are all already overqualified to work at McDonald’s. We. Will. Be. Okay.

I’m not going to act like I never freak out. If you know me, you will know I freak out. A lot. But, (many times) after considering the placement of my problem among the vast array of problems that exist, I tend to put my issue in perspective and realize it’s not so bad.

Again, I do not want you to hate me. I am not saying that your problems are not important. They are. Although there are people who are far worse off, it is important to note that everything is relative.

So, BU, I hope this column, my last of the semester, did not upset or confuse you too much. Perhaps Modest Mouse said it better: “don’t worry even if things end up a bit too heavy/ we’ll all float on.”