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We Real Cool By Gwendolyn Brooks Summary

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Analysis of “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks When I read out loud the poem “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first point, which caught my attention, was the author’s title. I read the title and I felt it would be about the positive feeling of the seven pool players because of the first sentence “We real cool.”(Brooks 497) While reading and listening to the all the stanzas of the poem my thoughts changed because I understood that this poem is just not about the positive feelings. However, this poem appears a strong emotional and it has combinations of feelings, which is to show the strong emotion. From my understanding of the poem “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks in this poem the stressed word “We” is the key point of the poem. This poem written in the 1950’s, which at that time the nation was facing with the civil rights movements. This poem has three stanzas and eight lines. Furthermore, in the poem Brooks used the word and stressed “We” eight times, but seven of them were the …show more content…

This poem used the actions such as “Left-school,” “Luke-late,” “Strike-straight,” “Sing-sin,” and “Die-soon.” From these activities, I conclude my thoughts and I understood that at the end the seven pool players ended up with the negative consequences. In addition, according to Koch “She does, however, enact a sense of suspension, employing the word “soon” to suggest that the young men, for the moment, still exist. At the same time, their present way of life assures their own temporality.” From this quote I obtained that the word “soon” meant that the pool players still alive, but if they continue their negative action, as a result they will die soon. Furthermore, for me the most dramatic part of the poem was the last line because when I read the poem from the begging, I never thought about the death. For that reason I was not ready to hear the death part, but it was true result of their

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Gwendolyn Brooks, in her poem “The Pool Players: Seven at the Golden Shovel,” implies that the [burn outs] or [drop outs] who succumb to this “golden” lifestyle will face consequences and that those consequences will ultimately lead to an unfortunate death. She establishes this idea first with the title: the number seven is usually associated with good fortune and because they are pool players could imply that they are a part of a gang that is in need of money, the name of the pool hall, “The Golden Shovel,” can symbolize those who choose the streets over an education will have a short life, with the word “golden,” you could assume that they (pool players) are young, and the word “shovel,” is correlated with a grave, insinuating that the

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In the beginning of the poem, Brook’s starts off with a two-line epigraph which discloses the persona’s location and group affiliation. The first line, “The Pool Player’s.” (534) establishes the young men’s coolness by associating them with a “cool” place: a pool hall. Furthermore, the second line, “Seven at The Golden Shovel.” (534) utilizes the number seven as a symbol for the pool players’ luck.

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The subtitle lets the reader know the characters and the setting. The poem is about seven boys who skipped school and went to a pool hall. One of the themes in this poem is rebellion, “ Left school” (Brooks line 2) and “Lurk late” (Brooks line 3). The rebellion is part of what the pool players consider cool. The seven boys think what they

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Throughout the first stanza in the poem Quite Frankly, Halliday talked about their deaths having no meaning. This is shown in the 1st line when it says, “They got old, they got old and died. But first - okay but first they composed plangent depictions of how much they lost and how much cared about losing. (Halliday,

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In the poem, Brooks uses literary devices such as connotation, tone, alliteration, rhymes, and repetition to give us a quick view into the rebellious lives of seven young boys who all seem to have one thing in common-- the struggle of social identity. To begin the poem, Brooks begins the poem by informing the readers who the poem is about and where it takes place. “The Pool Players… Seven at the Golden Shovel.” (891). She begins with this introduction to set the tone for the poem by giving the readers the setting; pool halls known for its dim lights, smoke, and alcohol.

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The second speaker also reshapes the first two lines of the entire poem into a plea to the majority. Beforehand, the first speaker uses those lines as a call for the old American spirit to be revived: “Let America be America again / Let it be the dream it used to be” (1-2). Both speakers change the meaning of the lines to express their thoughts on America. As a result, the poem expresses the desire for everyone to be treated equally in the land of freedom. The readers can relate to the speaker because they wish that everyone has equal rights in the country that proclaims itself to be the symbol of freedom.

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When looking upon Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, notes can be immediately inferred once looking at its title, “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell”. Titled in a rather unconventional manner, its lowercase letters imply wearisomeness or exhaustion rather than an emphasis on passion as improper capitalizations often do. Literally, the poem examines the life and hardships she must endure as an African American woman, going so far as to compare her present world to some form of hell. Growing up in Chicago, Brooks did not fit in, encouraged by other blacks to embrace her African heritage, and encouraged by Americans to embrace the patriotic spirit. Choosing to write in Shakespearean sonnet, Brooks conscientiously wrote in slant rhyme.

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