The Emperor of Ice Cream

Perhaps the most important American bard of "aesthetic bliss" was Wallace Stevens. Twenty years Nabokov's senior, Stevens was, like Nabokov, a literary genius whose works are at once difficult and engaging, with a strangely seductive music that has the capacity to haunt one long after a poem has been read, dissected, and forgotten.

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
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

("The Emperor of Ice Cream," from Harmonium).

Throughout his remarkable body of work, Stevens wrestled with a dialectic he posed as "imagination" versus "reality." This poem illustrates an early expression of that tension as the poet juxtaposes the death of an old woman with the festivities being prepared to commemorate the occasion. The intense aestheticism of the poet's apprehension does not lose sight of the shadows of mortality; yet, it cannot help but revel in the oddly comic gloss that the funeral preparations lend to the moment at hand. One may find relief from the oppressive facts of the human condition, if only in the ridiculous--or near ridiculous. For the poet does not obviously ridicule the proceedings; he remarks upon them, albeit with the "sly smile" of the refrain.

Like Nabokov, Stevens had arrived at the place "where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm": the place where "the two seas meet."

(Qur'an 18:60).