"The Emperor of Ice-Cream"

One of the first things that strikes me about Steven’s “Emperor of Ice-Cream” is the clear distinction between the two stanzas. The first stanza clearly has a more upbeat happy tempo. The first stanza has people bringing in cigars, and flowers as though it is a celebration of something. Stevens constructs the lines using phonemic relations such as in the line, “In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.” The last three words in this line all have the beginning “c.” The same thing happens in the next line with dawdle and dress. I think that by using this phenomic relation it gives the first part of the poem a more upbeat tempo. One line I found strange in the first stanza was, “let be be finale of seem.” The word finale seems so formal in this line. After going through the poem, by best guess for what this line really means is that you never know when you will die so you should enjoy life up until that point.
In the second stanza of the poem we get to the climax and find out what is really going on throughout the poem. We find out that the reason for this get together is actually a woman’s funeral. When describing the dead woman, Stevens uses very descriptive, almost eerie lines such as, “And spread it so to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come to show how cold she is and dumb.” To me this description really makes me imagine the scene of her lying there dead on her bed. I find the next line, “let the lamp affix its beam,” even more strange. I picture a surgery room light looking down on her cold, dead body. The whole imagery in the second stanza completely contradicts the light-hearted atmosphere in the first stanza.