What Work Is

“What Work Is” begins with a third person pronoun, with Philip Levine including both himself or the speaker and the reader: “We stand in the rain in a long line” (Line 1). This pronoun accomplishes several things: it engages the reader by immediately including them in the action of the poem, it creates a sense of intimacy between the speaker/poet and the reader (as if they shared some set of circumstances), and it interpretively opens up the poem’s potential subjects to the extent that it creates a sense of ambiguity about the poem’s characters.

However, it is the setting of the poem that is most important in its opening: people waiting in an employment line at “Ford Highland Park” (Line 2). The poem then introduces its second pronoun, this time in the second person: “You know what work is—if you’re / old enough to read this” (Lines 3-4). Levine introduces class inequality here by making the reader reflect on his own class status: “you know what / work is, although you may not do it” (Lines 4, 5). This disparity between those required to do hard labor to survive and those members of a high enough economic class that are not dependent on work to survive will be important throughout the poem.

Rather than dwelling on this direct address to the reader about class, Levine tells the reader to “Forget you” (Line 6). Instead, according to him, the poem “is about waiting” (Line 6), and the poem demonstrates this by returning to its description of the employment line. Notably, the “We” (Line 1) has now been transformed into a “you” (Line 10), although this second person pronoun seems to refer to a character in the poem—most likely the speaker, himself—and not the reader to whom the “you” (Line 3) referred only a few lines beforehand.

At this stage, the poem focuses on concrete, sensory details that make the scene more vivid: “Feeling the light rain falling […] / into your hair” (Lines 8-9). The rain blurs the vision of the figure in the poem, making him “think [he] see[s] [his] own brother / ahead” of him in line (Lines 11). After the figure “rub[s]” (Line 12) his glasses clean of rainwater with his fingers, it becomes clear that “of course it’s someone else’s brother” (Line 13). Although this man is “narrower across the shoulders” (Line 14) than the character/speaker’s brother, he shares both a bearing and a resolve: “the same sad slouch,” (Line 15), “grin” (Line 15), “stubbornness” (Line 16), and a “refusal to give in” (Line 17). In short, both the brother of the “you” and this unidentified man share a class struggle. Each must labor and struggle just to get work, putting in “hours of wasted waiting” (Line 18) only to be refused work by a hiring manager “for any / reason he wants” (Lines 21-22).

All this thinking of his brother has made the “you” remember that he “love[s] [his] brother” (Line 22). In fact, the character finds that he can “now suddenly […] hardly stand / the love flooding” (Lines 23-24) him for his brother. But the figure’s brother is not in the line with him because his brother already has a job, and he is currently “home trying to / sleep off a miserable night shift / at Cadillac” (Lines 26-28). The brother gets up “before noon” after a night shift, sacrificing sleep, to “study his German” (Line 29). Every night he “works eight hours” so that he can “sing / Wagner” (Lines 30-31). Unlike members of the upper or even middle class, the brother of the poem’s “you”/speaker is unable to pursue his passions except at great strain, sacrificing sleep and undertaking hours of “miserable” (Line 27) work all night.

The poem’s central character “hates [Wagner] most” (Line 31) of any opera, irreverently describing it as “the worst music ever invented” (Line 32). This criticism falls flat, though, in the face of the love “you” has for his brother. If the brothers were members of the upper class, and the “you”/speaker’s brother were able to pursue Opera full-time, then the “you” might be able to levy his criticism seriously. However, the brothers are not privileged enough to really engage in this kind of criticism in any meaningful way. Instead, they must both struggle to survive and to carve out any time they can to pursue anything but survival.

Next, the poem inquires, “How long has it been since you told him / you loved him” (Lines 33, 34). The figure in the poem must confront the fact that he has “never / done something so simple, so obvious” (Lines 36, 37) as “held” (Line 34), gazed upon with “eyes wide” (Line 35), said “I love you,” or “kissed [the] cheek” (Line 36) of his brother. While it may at first seem normal enough that two working-class men have not expressed affection this intimate, the poem is careful to state that this reticence is not the result of youth, stupidity, jealousy, cruelty, or “incapab[ility] of crying in / the presence of another man” (Lines 40, 41). Instead, it is because “you don’t know what work is” (Line 42). While ambiguous, this last line demonstrates the seriousness of work for the working class—that its weight can crush the humanity out of those subject to it. If the poem’s “you” truly understood the nature of work, he would not fail to express his feelings to his brother.