The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Recently, Ashley and I have started reading a poem each morning to our daughter Eva from the collection 100 Best Loved Poems. Last week, we came across Wallace Stevens’ The Emperor of Ice-Cream:

I’ll admit, my first impression was “wait… what?” I shrugged off the poem as being Jabberwocky-esque nonsense without the silliness and went on with my day. But, for whatever reason, I found a handful of lines from this poem running through my head the next few days. Later that week, I explored online, finding people smarter than I who could help break down the poem for me. For those that are more proficient in poetry than I am, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. For others, I’ll provide a brief synopsis. Essentially, the two stanzas describe two different rooms. In the first, you have people laboring in the kitchen to make ice cream. One thing to keep in mind is that this poem was written in 1922, at a time in which ice cream was a rare specialty. This is not something that you can simply pop over to the grocery store to pick up. It is an ephemeral delicacy, one that you savor, knowing that you must appreciate it in that moment, because soon it will melt and be gone. The second stanza shirts to a bedroom where again you see people laboring. This time they’re preparing a body, and you realize that the two scenes are displaying the preparation for a wake. Which brings us to the refrain: “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” Life, like ice cream, is beautiful and wonderful and, sadly, brief.

In the week since, I’ve found myself coming back to this poem often. And I’ve found myself reflecting on my job through the prism of Stevens’ work.

My initial reaction to this poem was apathy. But later, after I had time to process and let my curiosity increase, I came back to it on my own volition, seeking out support to help me with this challenging work. Then, after pushing through this productive struggle, I ended up with something meaningful and valuable to me. My question is whether how we ‘play school’ allows students to work through a similar process. Does the pacing of our curriculum prioritize the reflection time necessary for our students to derive value from the work? Or do we race through material for the sake of the EOGs? It was almost a full week until I felt like I truly connected with these 16 lines that Stevens wrote. And does our grading policies encourage our students to grow as learners? If I was given a letter grade reflecting my comprehension after my first reading (or even days later) it would not have been a passing one. Would that have propelled me to continue working or encouraged me to quit? It’s tempting at this moment to provide me credit for my perseverance and blame the generation of “lazy” students for the difference between how I eventually came to appreciate their work and their apparent apathy. But I reject this. For one thing, my initial reaction was apathy, so I’m no different. For another, WCPSS recently put out a survey finding that student engagement in the early years of elementary school is quite high, but then steadily declines over the years. So if they’re apathetic and disengaged, is that their fault or the fault of the system we’ve set up? As is often the case with this blog, I am posing questions without providing actionable answers. Hopefully one of you can serve up those.

My other two applications come from a pair of lines that have resonated with me. The first of which is “let be be the finale of seem.” This line’s a tricky one. I couldn’t entangle it, but I did stumble upon an interview by Stevens where he wrote “the true sense of Let be be finale of seem is let being become the conclusion or denouement of appearing to be: in short, icecream is an absolute good. The poem is obviously not about ice cream, but about being as distinguished from seeming to be.” This is a beautiful thought. How much of our lives do we spend obsessing over perception? Furthermore, how much of our careers do we spend chasing after how things seem? We inadvertently make these associations based on how kids seem (rife with implicit associations), but do we take the time to get to know who students actually are, rather than who they seem to be? To challenge our assumptions with objective data to identify what is actually occuring? In the future, when I’m relying on perception for the sake of time, I hope to remind myself to let be be the finale of seem.

Lastly, when things get tough, I’ve been trying to remind myself that “there is no emperor but the emperor of ice cream.” Our jobs are incredibly difficult. Increasingly so as our profession becomes more political and less profitable. There are plenty of times, I’m ashamed to admit, that I find myself looking on the career paths others have travelled down with petty jealousy. Times I find myself idolizing the emperor of wealth, or prestige, or possessions. But, the truth is, we have chosen careers that serve the emperor of ice cream. We have chosen careers that help others get the most out of this precious and precarious little helping of life that each person is given. At the end of the day, that is a calling worth being proud of. So, when things get tough next week, when I find myself spinning my wheels over work completion, or chasing perception, or fretting over the state of education, I’ll remind myself of Wallace Stevens’ words.