Philip Levine, in "Every Blessed Day," presents a paradoxical portrait of how a working class man copes with the realities of his life. In the course of what is ultimately a fairly brief excursus on the meaning of work, of life, and of manhood, the overarching theme addressed by the poet is that after a certain point in one's maturation, there is very little to truly differentiate one day of life from one another.
Levine's (8) protagonist awakens to a hard edged world where water tastes of iron and where he knows "exactly how much light/and how much darkness is there/before the dawn, gray and weak,/slips between the buildings." This is a bleak world filled with the rude awakening of "more and more colder water/ (poured over his head)" (8). It is a world in which this working man "thinks of places he/has never seen but heard/about, of the great desert/his father said was like no sea he had ever crossed" (8). In essence, he is haunted by the dreams and stories transferred to him by his own father and yet aware that he will never have the experiences that his father appears to have taken for granted. Nevertheless, it is in these recalled stories that he literally lives.
Levine (8) describes this man's life as follows: "and though his life was then/a prison he had come to live/for these suspended moments." The cold water with which he awakens himself, the dark skies before dawn, and "the cold at his back" as he waits for his bus "seven miles/from the frozen, narrow river" are his realities (8). His dreams are of the desert that "held all the shades of red/and blue in its merging shadows" (8). It is this never seen and never known world that this working man lives, tormented by the "hunger/for a different life, a lost life" (8).
He recognizes that the life that he has chosen or inadvertently come to live is not the life that he dreams of or in which he finds solace. His angst is such that he no longer asks hims...