Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip /
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
These lines introduce the cigar roller, setting the tone for the first stanza by linking his masculinity to the lustful ice cream he makes. His cigars are symbols of life and enjoyment with the threat of death implicit in them, a good indicator of the life-death juxtaposition that will be the poem's main focus. The textual suspense created by the line break at "whip" and the word choice to describe the ice cream increase the feeling of unstable, uncertain, lively energy in the scene.
Let the wenches dawdle...
This command, and its subsequent equivalent for the boys, continue the speaker's style of using imperative commands. This gives the impression that the speaker is appealing to a higher controlling figure, perhaps a parent or a master of the house who might try to control the girls' and boys' behavior, and urging them not to interfere, to let the youths go about their lives and let the scene unfold however it naturally will.
Let be be finale of seem.
This notoriously cryptic line employs the wordplay of using "be" as both a noun and a verb, and "seem" also as a noun. The speaker is urging us to examine life for what it is, not what it seems to be. In a sense, this is the central project of the poem: to expose and accept the details of commonplace life, as mundane and gaudy as it is. This "being" includes the random, dawdling behavior of the people in the kitchen.
Take from the dresser of deal, /
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
Here, the speaker shifts scenes, and focuses even more closely on minute details. The trio of long one-syllable words, "three glass knobs," forces the reader to slow down a bit over that image of vacancy and imperfection. The lines' opening syllables, "take" and "lack," with their echoing /k/ sound, focus the reader's attention on what is missing: what is being taken, and what is lacking. This is also accomplished by the delay of "that sheet," so we do not know immediately what is being taken from the dresser. In sharp contrast with the abundance of life in the kitchen, the second stanza creates a mood of absence and loss that emphasize the woman's lack of life.
If her horny feet protrude, they come /
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
This couplet highlights the sad lifelessness of the body, and the rhyme adds a capstone of finality to the woman's silence indicated by "dumb." The sentence is presented as a hypothetical, "If...", but the speaker's need to say it at all seems to indicate that her feet will inevitably show. No sheet or averted eyes will hide the fact of the woman's death, and this warning only goes to show the futility of trying to ignore it.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
This line forms an indirect pair with its counterpart in the first stanza, "Let be be finale of seem." In a similar way, the call for direct lamp light is a decision to face reality for what it is, both life and death. This is the speaker giving up on the attempted euphemism of the sheet, which cannot hide the woman's death anyway, and giving in to a plain acceptance that is almost medical in its phrasing. In the cold light of death, the speaker can see the physical facts of life.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Repeated twice, this line is the poem's crowning philosophical statement, as profound as it is whimsical. The line asserts the superiority of ice cream, as a symbol of the messy, indulgent forces of human life, over other figures we might cast as the "emperor" of human fate: Death, or perhaps God. (Stevens was a lifelong agnostic.) Rather than appeal to a higher power, the poem finds its truth in accepting the living reality of the moment. This is a bittersweet acceptance, given the presence of death in stanza two and the imperfections of the life depicted in stanza one—ice cream and death are both cold in their own way—but it is our reality, with no embellishment.
