Ice cream (symbol)
Ice cream is a powerful symbol of life, youth, enjoyment, and extravagance. As a treat, it is an object of desire for the attendees of the wake, and Stevens’ word choice encourages interpretations of ice cream as symbolic of youthful lust. With all these implications wrapped up in the dessert, the poem tells us that, if there is an “emperor” controlling human life, ice cream is the indulgent, transitory symbol that defines that force.
Flowers (symbol)
The boys’ flowers take on a double meaning: they are meant for the funeral, but cannot escape a romantic connotation in the context of the girls and the ice cream. In that way they encapsulate the life / death binary, while also reflecting how aspects of each are mirrored in the other.
Embroidered fantails (symbol)
The birds sewn into the deceased woman’s sheet are a mark of beauty and creativity, a material legacy of the woman’s spirit. However, this Romantic image is diminished by the sheet’s inability to adequately cover the woman’s body, making the birds seem a sad testament to the insufficiency of small human creations in the face of the finality of death.
Girls and boys (allegory)
The nameless group of girls and boys milling in the kitchen, of indeterminate age but inflected with sensual desire, form a microcosm of the living world outside of the scene of death. In the few lines of the poem in which they appear, the youths allegorically stand for the larger human environment of wanting and dawdling, and the tendency to ignore or make light of death. Though they appear superficial and irresponsible, the poem does not aim to criticize them, but rather presents a natural state that we all embody in some way.
Cold (motif)
The sensation of cold links the two stanzas in unexpected ways: ice cream is cold, by definition, but the only time the word is actually used is in describing the dead woman’s body. The cold of the ice cream creates an ironic duality: death is cold, but we also must embrace “the cold god of persistent life and appetite,” as critic Helen Vendler glosses the ice cream.
Human bodies (motif)
The physical bodies of the people in the poem form one of its strongest contrasts: the potent muscles of the cigar roller, the implied sensual potential of the girls and boys, and the cold, immobile feet of the woman. The poem generates much of the contrast between life and death in terms of these physical traits, and the tangible bodies in stanza one are emblematic of the natural life to which the speaker returns at the end of the poem.
