What Is Life love song – perhaps a "lovingly crafted paen" to Harrison's wife Pattie, as Alan Clayson puts it – or a devotional song like many of Harrison's compositions. Ian Inglis writes that the song title suggests a "philosophical debate about the meaning of life", yet its rendering as ""what is my life"" in the choruses "reshapes [the meaning] completely". Theologian Dale Allison finds no religious content in "What Is Life" but notes the "failure of words to express feelings" implied in the opening line (""What I feel, I can't say""), a recurring theme of Harrison's spiritual songs such as "That Is
What Work Is terribly damaged conditions of American labor, whose circumstance has perhaps never been more wrecked.” After Levine was named Poet Laureate, "What Work Is" reached the top of Amazon.com's "Movers and Shakers" list. What Work Is What Work Is is a collection of poetry by Philip Levine. The collection has many themes that are representative of Levine's writing including physical labor, class identity, family relationships and personal loss. Its primary focus on work and the working class led to it being studied with emphasis on Marxist literary criticism. The focus on work is expressed in thematically different ways throughout the collection.