Time & Perspective Quote by Philip Levine

Levine’s line is a street-corner exhortation dressed up as ars poetica: look, here they come, pay attention. The urgency matters. This isn’t the poet drifting into reverie; it’s a foreman’s bark redirected toward the soul. Levine, the great laureate of industrial America, spent his life insisting that the so-called ordinary (workers, lunch pails, night shifts, exhausted bodies) isn’t raw material waiting to be elevated. It’s already freighted with meaning. The problem is our attention, dulled by routine and hierarchy.

“Let your eyes transform” sounds mystical until you catch the trick: the “transformation” is less about changing the world than changing the viewer. Levine’s subtext is democratic and adversarial. The culture trains us to treat certain lives as scenery; he counters with a demand that the everyday be seen as history happening. “Here they come” hints at a collective entering the frame - laborers, neighbors, the ignored many - and it carries a faint political charge, like a procession you can’t pretend not to notice.

The phrase “moment in time” paired with “fragment of eternity” is Levine’s engine: he collapses the false split between the transient and the timeless. A single observed instant can disclose an entire life, an era, a moral reality. The poem’s intent isn’t escape but witness. Attention becomes an ethical act, a way of refusing erasure - and a way of admitting that the epic has been unfolding all along on factory floors and city blocks, waiting for someone to look straight at it.