Philip Levine You Can Have It

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The poem that resonated the greatest with me was “You Can Have It” by Philip Levine, because of how the poem depicts a young men working to the extent of everything around him seeming halted. As Leo Tolstoy once stated, “In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you”, revealing how if people are only invested in work daily, living becomes uneventful. When we think of our early 20s, what comes to mind usually is not the monotony derived from working countless hours or the two personas we may have to take up to continue working multiple jobs. However, that is what Levine describes in “ You Can Have It”,where Levine demonstrates the effects industrialization can have on the pace of a city. At the start of the poem the …show more content…
I found this line interesting because it paralleled the lifestyle I lived while working, time seemed to fly and I missed a lot of family events due to my work schedule. I lived for the paycheck and did not really pay too much attention to the things that happened around me like Easter, Fourth of July, or Christmas Eve. I spent my days working, a victim of my own strength. Although, I was young and motivated I was inexperienced and that resulted in my own undoing much like the speaker of the …show more content…
While working long hours in the busy city of Las Vegas I often found myself reflecting on what my life had become. I would constantly contemplate, why I Chose to work at a fast food restaurant. It was not because of the food we sometimes would get for free when their hold times expired or the variety of new co- workers I met with different backgrounds, who rarely stayed longer than a month. I often think the reason I stayed was because I felt as though they needed me, or at least people like me who were consistent and stayed despite the angry customers and power tripped managers. I felt I was providing a service greater than myself, feeding the bellies of vacationers or employees like myself on their way to work. I thought about this a lot while I wiped dining room tables and stared at the windows onto the busy, car filled streets. I did not like my job, but I would have never thrown it away. I felt I was obligated to stay, no one sympathized for the highschooler who was just trying to make some extra change, they just expected you to smile, hand them the correct change along with their food and wish them a farewell. I sometimes when I went to other fast food restaurants or occasionally another Wendy's would start to lecture my family of how important each worker was. This would usually result in my step dad and brother teasing me on how hard it must be to flip
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