When Giving is All We Have

At the heart of Rios’s upbeat celebration of giving is simple and practical advice: We must take care of each other. 

Critical to Rios’s work is his Catholic faith and his lifelong love of the classroom; the poem’s speaker affects a spiritual and teacherly tone, moving from easy-to-understand symbols drawn from the real world—rivers, old books, colors, and house nails—to more abstract and complex epigrams that illuminate the paradoxical nature of giving, as summed up by the title: The more we give, the more we have. 

The poem’s two-line epigraph offers an image of nature: rivers coming together. In using the image of a small river joining another and thus eventually adding its strength to a mighty network, the metaphor argues that coming together for mutual aid is an innate part of nature: The dynamic of giving is simply how it operates, rejecting isolation and separation as insufficient. Any ecosystem is an example of giving as a strategy for empowerment. 

Rios sets the epigraph apart rather than having it serve as the poem’s opening couplet. This both foreshadows and contrasts with the closing one-line stanza. Both epigraph and the last line seem isolated from the poem.