You Can Have It

Levine’s poem “You Can Have It” is an elegy to lost youth, crushed by the hard work necessitated by survival. Set in “Detroit” (Line 25) right after World War II, this narrative poem focuses on a pair of working-class siblings engaged in hard physical labor. The poem starts in “1948” (Line 25) but shifts to the speaker’s reflections of 1978. The speaker reflects on his new understanding of hard labor’s effect on his sibling. The speaker notes, “we were twenty” (Lines 21), with the “we” suggesting that the characters are twins (See: Biographical Context). The effect of the twinning of the speaker’s experience with the sibling’s, while not elaborated upon, makes the reflective nature of the poem particularly poignant.

The speaker reveals that “[i]n 1948” (Line 25), he used to work at a bottling plant where he “stacked cases of orange soda […] one gray boxcar at a time” (Lines 19-20). The job felt endless because there were “always two more [boxcars] waiting” (Line 21). The speaker’s sibling worked “[all] night at the ice plant” (Line 17), where he “fed / the chute its silvery blocks” (Lines 17-18). Both jobs require heavy physical lifting.