We all know that formerly, Death was a woman with a sickle. The sickle speaks of relentless reaping in the neutral light of silent fields. The Greek poet saw the passage of human lives as a light crackle of falling leaves. Like sheaves of wheat, we await the hour of final silence. Further afield, the reaping goes on into the evening.
Death is also – as in a Book of Hours, vaporous and melancholic – a pale, luxuriant lady with a glimmer of jewels on her cloak. Or the brusque terror of a skeleton kissing a naked maiden, or embracing a matron who offers up the prideful bouquet of lust. At times, Death may be a man: a comely gentleman, dressed in black, seductive, even, like Frederic March in an old film. Sometimes Death is not personified, but is instead the path from this present world to the aqueous one beyond the mirror.
Then, there is a poem by Wallace Stevens that speaks to us of Death in another way. Death? Well, it doesn’t speak to us anywhere of Death; no one makes us read the poem in this light. Civilised, refined, reticent, the North American poet knew that the complex mechanics of word and image a writer sets in motion are richer if slightly ambiguous. In art, ambiguity is often the sincerest tribute to veracity, because there is a kind of fidelity to truth only obtainable when we have learned to respect the imprecision of lived experience. What is the meaning of those transient minutes of a sonata by Domenico Scarlatti? Everything and nothing, if we ask here of meaning consonance with meaning of the kind characteristic of a text like the one you are presently reading.
Let us not talk too long, then, about the meaning of Wallace Stevens’s poem; let us talk instead of what it says. And what it says is, briefly, that we human beings may persist, with concupiscent curds, and dresses, and flowers wrapped in newspaper; that we may take things from the dresser and a sheet that will cover a cold, dumb face. We may do these things, but it’s all the same, because on this earth, there is only one emperor. And we may imagine this emperor as very cold and very white, or perhaps half-molten and brightly, vividly coloured. Someone gentle and benevolent, a snowman, perhaps. Like the snowman, he has a chummy air about him. But if we approach him, his touch will freeze us. This is the sentence of all empires. Because, the poem says, the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. Death, the great vendor of ice cream.
13 June 1980