17 pages • 34-minute read
You Can Have It
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Symbols & Motifs
Moonlight and Spotlight
In a pivotal moment, the twin says, “You can have it” (Line 4). In his bedroom, his sibling overhears him and sees that “his unshaven face is whitened / like the face of the moon” (Lines 6-7) whose light “streams in the window” (Line 5). Later in the poem, the speaker returns to this image, pleading, “[G]ive me back the moon / with its frail light falling across a face” (Line 39-40). This moonlit image symbols several things. First, the moonlight acts as a spotlight to the poem’s events, highlighting the pivotal “moment” (Line 10) when the twin gave up. Second, the light metaphorically illuminates the sibling, who seems chosen to bear the brunt of the work by some cold outside force or observer. Lastly, the poem compares the brother’s “unshaven face” (Line 6) to “the face of the moon” (Line 7), suggesting a twinning effect that echoes the relationship between the brothers. This connotes the event’s cruciality to their relationship.
The Maw of the Machine
The sibling works the night shift at the “ice plant” (Line 17), where he “fed / the chute its silvery blocks” (Lines 18-19). The word “fed” (Line 18) suggests something alive and hungry for the physical labor of the man who is only “twenty” (Line 21). Here, the poem uses personification to reveal the machine’s monstrosity, with a gaping mouth that must be satiated. This suggests something out-of-control and pushes the young man’s rote labor into the realm of horror. This resembles Sisyphus in Greek mythology, the character condemned to always roll a stone to the top of a hill. The beastly machine leaves the brother exhausted and somnambulant, with a “heart that always labors” (Line 14).
The Wrong Clothes
American literature has long scrutinized the stratification of the haves and have-nots in American life, and Levine’s poetry is renowned for its efforts to dignify the working class. The speaker’s cognizance of being “always in / the wrong clothes” (Lines 22-24) shows how economic hardship keeps the siblings from finer things. They are “always in” (Line 22) a perpetual state of work that keeps them “crusted with dirt / and sweat” (Line 24). The “clothes” (Line 23) do not make the man, but they do identify his class and status, and this brief description heavily indicates how others judged the siblings as “wrong” (Line 23) or less than.
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