The Emperor of Ice Cream- Wallace Stevens

     If I hadn't done research on this poem and the author, I would've interpreted this in a completely different way. He never really comes out and says straight up the setting or event where this poem is taking place, which in a way makes the reader have to look deeper and come up with their own theories. Maybe because this was written in 1922, and we don't have the same customs that they did back then it was harder for me to understand, either way it made it interesting to try and interpret.
       This poem is about the death of a middle class woman and how her family and friends are preparing for the funeral. The women show up in their usual funeral dresses, cigars are made, and the flowers are brought in old newspapers. The sheet was put over her body, but the feet were left uncovered as a tradition to show mortality. Clues like "Let be be finale of seem," "to show how cold she is," are more apparent that he is talking about a funeral after I looked more into this poem, but at first I didn't really think anything of them. The thing that threw me off was the title, and why ice-cream would be mentioned. Apparently he is referring to the man they hired to make ice cream for the wake, although there has to be a deeper meaning because the poem revolves around this theme. Although I couldn't find proof that he was religious or an atheist, but I think the emperor is either referring to God or just death in general. No matter what anyone does, in the end nobody can control death besides God (or death itself).
           I liked the small descriptions that Stevens uses. Most of them don't add any meaning to the poem, but still have an impact. By saying call the muscular cigar roller, or describing that the dresser was missing knobs, and the flowers were in last months newspapers really create a mental image of what's going on. The sentences are broken up by the lines without a whole lot of rhythm, but other then that the structure is pretty standard. He repeats the last line "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream" at the end of both stanzas to create emphasis on its' meaning, which I really liked. This poem was really interesting and I liked the way he described the event, definitely unique.