Philip Levine's poem "You Can Have It" is written in trochaic, unrhymed quatrains. Levine uses simple language in these quatrains, which allows the reader to comprehend the meaning of the poem easily. I believe he is writing about one person who appears to be a blue collar worker reflecting thirty years back on his hard past. He wishes he could erase that year of 1948 from his memory. The title, which the poet includes twice throughout the poem, describes the speaker's frustration during that year. Levine's poetic form, use of imagery and simple language all relate to the meaning of the poem.
There seems to be only one person in the poem assuming the speaker and the brother are one. I came to this conclusion in the third and fourth stanzas when the poet states, "each man has one brother" and "together they are only one man sharing a heart". After numerous readings of the poem I believe the speaker has two jobs that completely consumed his life and robbed him of his young adulthood. The poet restates the title in his poem twice assuring the reader the speaker was disappointed by the way he lived in 1948. .
The use of quatrain form in this poem works effectively achieving the fluctuation between the present and thirty years prior. This type of poetic form also separates certain thoughts of the poet yet combines others. The separation occurs when the poet goes back and forth between the present and the past. The poet uses run-on lines to combine two stanzas of the same meaning. The run -on lines Levine uses carry on into the next stanza because the point wasn't complete in four lines. Levine also has some very short and straight to the point sentences that the reader hears clearly. The poem itself seems to be a simple poem in which the common method of using quatrains works appropriately with the meaning. .
Levine clearly uses imagery to pronounce the meaning of his poem, which is evident from the beginning.
