Analysis of Featuring Philip Levine
He observed
Time split between
Fresno and NYC.
Places where people crowded
Jostled, ate, fought
Loved and mourned.
His was a clarion horn.
Jewish born in Motown.
Knew of assembly line
And colour line
And homes so fine in Dearborn.
Not his of course.
But a printed page housed
His fine furnishings rare.
His memorabilia fair.
His bracing pine air.
Just like Michigan’s North.
Belle Isle, 1949
We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow. I remember going under
hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl
I'd never seen before, and the cries
our breath made caught at the same time
on the cold, and rising through the layers
of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere
that was this world, the girl breaking
the surface after me and swimming out
on the starless waters towards the lights
of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low out ahead
to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers
walking alone. Back panting
to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from.
Philip Levine, "Belle Isle, 1949" from They Feed They Lion and The Names of the Lost. Copyright © 1999 by Philip Levine. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf.
Scheme | XXAXXXBXCCBXXDDD X X EFCXFXXXGXAXXXAXXEXGADXXX X |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 101 1101 1001 1011010 1011 101 1101001 10101 110101 011 011101 1111 101011 111001 100101 11011 1111 11 11001111 0110100110 101001001 1111110100 10110101010 101101011 110101001 101111011 1010101010 11001010110 11110110 0101010101 101100101 11001001 10111001 10111111011 10011111 11110101 0010101101 11111110110 1001110 101111101 1101111 010111010 1111111 10011111111000110110110011101011001 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,509 |
Words | 294 |
Sentences | 19 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 16, 1, 1, 25, 1 |
Lines Amount | 44 |
Letters per line (avg) | 27 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 237 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 55 |
About this poem
For our final feature of 2015, we celebrate the great Philip Levine, who passed away in February at age 87. In place of our usual interview, we offer tributes in poetry and prose from Levine’s friends, students and admirers. He was a deeply beloved man, not only for his poetry and friendship but for his legendary, catalyzing teaching, which changed the lives of so many students, including the late Larry Levis, who remembered him this way: “When I try to imagine the life I might have had if I hadn’t met Levine, if he had never been my teacher, if we had not become friends and exchanged poems and hundreds of letters over the past twenty-five years, I can’t imagine it. That is, nothing at all appears when I try to do this. No other life of any kind appears.” Levine was born in 1928 in industrial Detroit, one of three sons of Russian Jewish immigrant parents. His father died when he was five, and he started working in auto factories when he was fourteen, later capturing these experiences in poems. more »
Written on March 26, 2023
Submitted by dougb.19255 on March 26, 2023
Modified by dougb.19255 on March 26, 2023
- 1:28 min read
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"Featuring Philip Levine" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/154956/featuring-philip-levine>.
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