A poem by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) describing the scene after the death of an ordinary woman. Preparations are being made for a wake in her house, which bustles with activity even as she lies “cold” and “dumb.” The poem appeared in Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium (1923).
In a letter of 1933, Stevens remarked: “I think I should select from my poems as my favorite the Emperor of Ice Cream. This wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it.”
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