Dumbass Essay 2

Zenia Patricia
AP English
Mr. Sheehan
17 February 2015

The Emperor of Ice Cream is the most popular poem of Wallace Stevens. Stevens "plots" this story into two equal stanzas: one for the kitchen where the ice cream is being made, and another for the bedroom where the corpse awaits decent covering. He "plots" it further by structuring the poem as a series of commands from an unknown master of ceremonies, directing in an expression of extreme oddness of the neighbors in their funeral duties.
Both the symbolic kitchen stanza and the symbolic bedroom stanza end with the same third-order refrain echoed by the title. "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream." The title, in simple words, means something like this: since life is like ice-cream, the ruling standard of life and its reality is the emperor of that fact itself; therefore, enjoy life as you'd enjoy ice-cream itself.
The title reflects that human beings are no more resistant to death than ice cream is to the sun. The poet speaks in the voice of a man, addressing the neighbors to carry out the funeral in certain ways. It is common in some communities to satisfy the dead in this way, with food and drink, after a time of mourning.
The poem begins with the neighbor's confident command to the other people; he is giving instructions as to how to conduct the funeral. In the first stanza, the man calls for a person muscular enough to whip up desserts by hand; perhaps there is not enough money for an expensive mixer. People must eat and drink when they arrive the poor woman's house to attend her 'wake' and funeral. This implies that we need not grieve and fast and torture the living when one who has died. The desserts will have to be served in kitchen cups; there is no fine china or crystal. The common people who will attend will come in their everyday clothes, rather than formal attire; the flowers will be brought in last month's newspapers, rather than in vases, or as garlands. All these details suggest that there is nothing fanciful, nothing romantic, or nothing special about death and its aftermath; indeed, death is too ordinary and natural to be shocking. Stevens avoids the synonyms and denials that often accompany the details and descriptions of death. From the second stanza, the poem continues with the preparations. The man asks someone to take a sheet from the top of a broker dresser to cover the dead woman's face; even if that means that her ugly feet will protrude from the too short covering. Instead of lighting soft and dim candles, the bright light should be turned to glare on her body, to show that she is now cold and silent in death. Stevens is insisting that one must look directly at death, in all its matter of fact, and see it not as a state of some mystical or spiritual transformation, but rather as actual fact to be faced and dealt with. To romanticize death is to invite more grief than less. The wake takes place in the

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