Life and death
The poem's primary contrast is the proximity of life and death, energy versus stasis, potential versus impotence. Stevens is far from the first poet to suggest that we can best appreciate life by juxtaposing it with death—such was a favorite topic of John Keats and his contemporaries—but “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” departs from the Romantic vision of life’s sublime beauty, offering instead a realistic picture of its messy, crude energies. After facing the cold fact of the dead body, the poem’s speaker seems to conclude that we must accept life at face value. In Stevens’ words from a 1951 letter, “The final reality is not death but life, as it is, without any pretenses.”
Ordinary objects
The poem gives great importance to physical objects: ice cream, flowers in newspaper, dresser knobs, an embroidered sheet, and a lamp. It suggests that by examining mundane items as evidence of the lives of the people using them, we can learn something about life. Stevens wrote in a letter, “The point of ["The Emperor of Ice-Cream"] is to isolate and make crisp the commonplace.” Certain objects in the poem become linked with life, some with death, and the poem seems to claim that we can make sense of reality by stripping it down to a set of basic physical components.
Youth
The age of the wenches and boys in the kitchen is unclear, but they embody a youthful energy that contrasts with the dead woman. Stevens’ choice to depict dallying young people waiting for ice cream suggests that their carefree sensuality contains the essence of life, as it contrasts most with death.
Lust and desire
Lust and desire appear in far more places than we would expect in a poem about a funeral, most notably in the “concupiscent curds.” This tone inflects how the characters appear, and highlights the romantic potential energy buzzing in the kitchen among the muscular man, the wenches, and the boys. The poem makes these energies central to everyday life, and thus they appear strikingly once we examine life plainly with all pretense stripped away.
Passing of time
The passage of time is implied in the poem through “last month’s newspapers” and the aging wood dresser whose owner never got around to replacing its missing knobs. Though the poem’s setting spans only a few moments in a limited space, these details help situate the scene in the broader stream of time. The newspapers, already obsolete, are reminders that time is fleeting, and that youthful love, such as the boys might be pursuing, is transitory and full of lost moments. The woman’s dresser signifies the human work undone by time or left incomplete at the end of a life: all the more reason to return to the ice cream party and appreciate life in all its mundanity.
