The Emperor of Ice Cream

The Emperor of Ice Cream is both a quoted poem and a recurring interpretive device in the novel. Wallace Stevens’s verses appear at the opening of Part Two and return in scenes surrounding corpses, fear, memory, and descent into danger. The poem’s refrain, “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream,” places death beside an emblem of ordinary appetite, while the novel repeatedly uses that collision to strip away comforting abstractions and force attention onto what is physically present.

The Poem and Its Refrain

The novel presents the poem in two parts. The first section opens with the command, “Call the roller of big cigars,” then calls for flowers to be brought in “last month’s newspapers.” Its language joins rough, domestic materials to a ceremonial atmosphere: cigars, newspapers, a dresser, and a sheet become the objects of a makeshift rite. The refrain, “Let be be finale of seem,” rejects appearance as a sufficient account of reality. What seems elegant, orderly, or consoling must yield to what exists beneath the surface.

The second section sharpens that confrontation with the dead. It describes a woman whose “horny feet protrude,” displaying how cold and silent she is, before repeating the instruction, “Let the lamp affix its beam.” The lamp’s light does not beautify the scene; it fixes attention on the corpse. The repeated declaration that “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream” therefore works as paradox. Ice cream suggests pleasure, appetite, and temporary sweetness, while the surrounding imagery insists on bodily decay and finality. The poem does not make death less real. Instead, it denies that death can be displaced by decorative language or metaphysical reassurance.

Appearance at Mike Ryerson’s Corpse

The poem becomes especially important when Ben Mears, Matthew Burke, Jimmy Cody, and Parkins Gillespie examine Mike Ryerson’s body. Jimmy’s medical discussion of cadaveric reflexes gives the scene a clinical surface, but the dead eyelid rolling shut with grotesque slowness makes the body seem to perform a final, disturbing gesture. Jimmy remains technically composed, even producing a small hammer, while Ben experiences dark laughter rising inside him. The contrast makes the examination more than an inventory of physical signs: it becomes a struggle over how death can be understood and spoken about.

Ben notices the yellow rings of callus on the bottoms of Mike Ryerson’s feet, at the ball of the heel and the instep. That precise, ordinary detail connects the corpse to the life the man possessed before death, even as it confirms that the body is now motionless. Ben recalls the Stevens poem and misquotes its refrain as “Let it be the finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.” Jimmy identifies the passage as a poem about death, while Parkins reduces it to something resembling an ice-cream vendor’s slogan. The exchange exposes the poem’s double register: it is literary and ceremonial for Ben and Matthew, yet stubbornly connected to common commerce and appetite. The body in front of them prevents either register from becoming safely abstract.

Memory, Fear, and the Descent

The refrain returns during the descent into Eva Miller’s root cellar, where Ben and Mark Petrie enter the darkness in search of Kurt Barlow. Ben thinks that he is going to his death, and the thought arrives naturally, without regret, beneath an overwhelming glacier of fear. His memory fragments into references to Psycho, Edgar Allan Poe, a threatened burial, and the remembered statement, “We’re going to kill you anyway.” The poem enters this chain of recollection as another cultural phrase that death has appropriated.

Ben repeats to himself, “Let be be the finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream,” then remembers that Matthew Burke is dead, Wallace Stevens is dead, Susan Norton is dead, and Miranda is dead. The repetition no longer functions as detached literary commentary. It becomes a mental refrain through which Ben measures the possible end awaiting him. The poem’s assertion that the material world is sovereign is transformed into a recognition that memory, literature, love, and death occupy the same fearful mental field. Ben’s fear does not disprove the poem; it demonstrates how its words persist when every protective illusion is failing.

At the bottom of the cellar, rats close in on Ben and Mark. They use flit guns to force the animals back, then discover a cracked flashlight whose bulb still works. Its beam first catches a pool table covered in plastic and then the remains of Jimmy Cody, lying in a dark puddle after a thousand rats have consumed him. The scene fulfills the poem’s method of illumination: the light reveals an unadorned physical fact, and the refrain’s language of finality becomes inseparable from the concrete destruction of the body.

Blue Chalk and the Novel’s Repetition

The poem’s motif is also linked to the clues that allow Ben to locate Barlow’s hiding place. In a trailer containing the dead children’s toys, Ben notices blue chalk, three shaded lights in a row, and men moving around a green pool table beneath bright lights, brushing blue chalk from their fingertips. The image gives him the recognition that makes him shout that he has found the answer. The pool-table vision and the cellar’s actual pool table connect mental imagery, memory, and physical location; what first appears as a detached fragment becomes a route into the hidden chamber.

The recurrence of “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream” therefore accompanies successive confrontations with death but also with recognition. It appears beside Mike Ryerson’s corpse, within Ben’s terror before the final descent, and near the discovery of the material setting in which Jimmy has been killed. The poem’s insistence on the visible and bodily helps the novel move from speculation to revelation: corpses must be examined, clues must be seen, and hidden evil must eventually be located in a real room beneath a real house.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The novel places The Emperor of Ice Cream at the beginning of Part Two and repeats its title again near the close of the supplied structure, making the poem a frame for the book’s movement through death and confrontation. Its language opposes “seem” to what the lamp makes visible, and the novel repeatedly stages that opposition through vampires who appear human, corpses that move, memories that become clues, and houses whose ordinary surfaces conceal violence.

The poem does not provide a supernatural explanation for the events. Its role is more severe and more grounded: it supplies a vocabulary for confronting the fact that mortality cannot be made harmless by taste, ritual, scholarship, or inherited stories. In the examination of Mike Ryerson, Ben’s memories of the dead, and the cellar where Jimmy Cody’s remains are found, the refrain becomes a measure of reality. Pleasure may continue to exist, but it does not cancel death; appearance may persist, but it cannot finally rule. The emperor is the material world in its sweetness and its horror, and the novel returns to that proposition whenever its characters are forced to look directly at what has happened.