A Story formed from Wallace Steven’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”

Here is how I envisioned the poem after reading it several times. I have attempted to dissect it into a sort-of story. It took me a number of close readings to even come up with this interpretation. Hopefully it reads out right enough. I could not think of anything else to do with the piece. Duality really is an important concept and often used to contrast in poetry. This poem is a prime example of this happening.

A Story formed from Wallace Steven’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”

I went to a nearby house to help lay out the body of an old woman who had died all by herself. I went hoping to help prepare the home for the wake. Accustomed with the home, as a neighbor should be, I entered through the kitchen door rather than the front. I was appalled as I entered the kitchen; the disorderly mess going on inside set me back. A large brawny neighbor who worked at the local cigar factory had been called in to crank the ice cream machine in preparation for the wake, and various neighbors had sent over their girls to help out and their boys bearing flowers wrapped in old newspapers from their yards to decorate the house.

Taking advantage of the occasion, the girls continued to “dawdle” around the kitchen and philander and flirt with the young men. They were all waiting around to have a taste of the ice cream when it was finally finished. The whole scene seemed crude and misplaced when I remembered that the old woman lay dead in her bedroom, yet all of this activity continued to spiral around inside her home. Where there is death in one room, there is much life and bustle in the other. It seemed bizarre.

Then I left the kitchen, and went in to the bedroom. The corpse of the old woman was lying uncovered on the bed. Upon seeing the old woman’s body, I first felt the need to find a sheet to cover the corpse’s expressionless face. I went to the old dresser “of deal”, but it was hard to get a sheet out because the drawers were lacking knobs. She may have been too sickly to get out to the store to get new glass knobs, or she just didn’t mind struggling to open the drawers. Eventually I did get out a sheet, and a beautiful one it was, embroidered with fantails.

Her feet stuck out of the bottom of this short sheet. It was as if I couldn’t hide death, I could just mask it for the time being. Even in masking it, I still could not completely cover the reality of death. Even though I covered her body, her dead, lifeless feet still “protruded” from the bottom of the cover. It seemed worse to have to look at her feet than to look at her face. To me, her feet seemed deader, more lifeless and depressing than her empty face.

She had died and that could not be hidden by a sheet. Her life had ended and all that was left is a shell. While all of this was going on, out in the kitchen, the bizarre scene still continued, with the large cigar-roller cranking the ice cream, as the rest of the people cavorted in their own interests. They were sent to help with a lonely dead woman’s wake but fall into their own greedy nature instead. They represent human nature and its preoccupation with self-interest.