17 pages • 34 minutes read
You Can Have It
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
The poem’s 44 lines are free-verse, meaning they employ neither consistent rhyme pattern nor definitive meter, but they are organized in 11 quatrains (stanzas of four lines). The poem’s organization relies instead on narrative structure, and alternating time periods between sections creates a sense of longing and nostalgia.
The poem employs a distanced-remembering speaker, who, writing from the present of 1978, looks back on “1948” (Line 25) and his “young brother” (41), who is fed up with work. Stanzas 1 and 2 depict the past—one evening when the sibling comes home from work. The poem then proceeds to the lyrical reflections of the present-day narrator in Stanzas 3 and 4. Stanzas 5 and 6 return to the siblings’ past and specify their employment and factory work in the 1940s. The realization that their youth was dominated by hardship again prompts reflections on time lost in Stanzas 7, 8, 9; recalling this, the speaker is now 50. The poem ends with Stanzas 10 and 11 organized around the current’s speaker’s plea to go back to “1948” (Line 25) and the evening when his sibling last seemed whole and potential lay ahead. This structure enhances the themes of memory, loss, and regret.
Elegy
“You Can Have It,” has been called an elegy, a poem that reflects on mourning, loss, or death. Elegies can be traced to Greek tradition as a poetic verse form written in couplets. In the 18th century, elegies often used quatrains, a technique “You Can Have It” employs. However, Levine’s poem follows a loose contemporary form and takes liberties with traditional elegiac rhyme scheme (which is ABAB) and meter (which is iambic pentameter). While some see the speaker’s twin as actually deceased, it may be only his youth that has died—but this does not lessen the speaker’s mourning. The poem’s second half includes several images of barrenness and waste as the speaker reflects on a lacuna in his memory and on the changing of the seasons, grieving the loss of who his sibling was before he had a “heart that always labors” (Line 14). In the last few stanzas, the speaker’s plaintive bargains—as well as his plea to “give me back my young brother” (Line 41)—directly aligns the poem’s tone with the elegiac.
Subtle Repetitive Sounds: Assonance and Consonance
Levine is known for his subtle musicality, which enhances his message in “You Can Have It.” To heighten the poem’s emotional impact, the poet uses assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds; and consonance, the repetition of consonant sounds. The assonance of the short “a” emphasizes the breathlessness and desperation of the sibling, and the consonance of “t” plays with the conception of time. In Lines 13-16, the short “a” sound enhances a sense of “gasp[ing]” (Line 15) even before the breathing is described. The focus on the “ah/eh” suggests a panting sound, and the short “a” conveys a breathlessness:
one man
sharing a heart that always labors, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it (Lines 13-16)?
In Lines 20-24, Levine uses consonance similarly to enhance the theme of transience. The focused consonance of “t” imitates a ticking sound, which echoes a clock, indirectly hinting at the passage of time. This appears in
one gray boxcar at a time
with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty (Lines 20-24).
The hard, sharp “t” reverberates through these lines, increasing the sense of agitation over lost time.
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By Philip Levine
