Poem Analysis: We Real Cool By Gwendolyn Brooks

In California 25.3 percent of high school students won't graduate high school. In “We Real Cool,” Gwendolyn Brooks uses rhyme and repetition along with imagery and metaphors to convey her message. Brooks wrote this poem one day when she was walking through her neighborhood in Chicago. She passed a pool hall and saw a group of young boys playing pool. She described them as young and “cool” or more accurately “trying” to be cool. Brooks uses her poem to illustrate what one day of skipping school or listening to peer pressure can come to.
“We real cool,” in simplest terms, is about a group of boys that are “too cool for school.” In lines one and two it says “We real cool. We/ Left school.” (Brooks) the author associates being cool with skipping school to introduce peer pressure to her readers. By doing so, Brooks shows readers that peer pressure can be very dangerous to kids, especially teenagers. Another peice of evidence is “We/ Sing sin.” (Brooks 5-6) Brooks once again shows her audience that teenagers are often pressured to do something wrong to seem cool or impress their friends. In this instance Brooks uses “sing sin” to refer to bad language, or behavior. In the final line of the poem Brooks says “Die soon.” She says this because she empathizes for them. Brooks knows what happens to young boys on the street. She wrote

At the end of every sentence Brooks ends with “we” (1-8) she does this to emphasize that this is a group activity, which illustrates how it's easier to misbehave if it is in a group. This also creates an original rhythm for the poem otherwise known as identical rhymes. If she didn't end with “we” her rhyme pattern would be “aa” “bb” “cc” “dd.” One of the other major sounds that Brooks uses are one-syllable words. “We real cool. We/ Left school.” (Brooks 1-2) All of Brooks’s words are one single syllable. This contributes to the beat throughout the poem and relates her poem to