We Real Cool  Launch Audio in a New Window
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS
               The Pool Players.
        Seven at the Golden Shovel.

            We real cool. We
            Left school. We

            Lurk late. We
            Strike straight. We

            Sing sin. We
            Thin gin. We

            Jazz June. We
            Die soon.



We real cool is the poem I choose to analyze. This poem repeats the word we a lot, and that got me thinking who is we? Is we meaning us, or is we mean the authors friends or something. I also see that in the poem the lines in the stanzas have rhyming words such as cool, school, late, straight, sin, gin, june, soon. I found that interesting and all the lines end with “we” expect the final line “Die soon” so the pattern would be A,A,A,A,A,A,A,B. Personally I believe that was place there for a reason, it showed that this story basically just got real and sad because once you say die soon that’s pure negativity nothing good is coming from that. So this drove me to believe that the Overall the meaning of this poem is about life. How everyone wants to be cool, then graduate school having fun party at night, doing bad stuff like probably singing bad lyrics to a song out loud, I say this because in the poem there was a part where it said that “ We sing sin” when I heard that this just popped into my head. But the meaning could be that we all are going to do this at some points in our life then we are eventually we all going to have to die. Life is short so do the crazy things now because next thing you know your gonna be laying on your death bed , regret not taking risk and saying to yourself what if I had done this or that, what would had happen. Also there’s some words I couldn’t quite make out like “Jazz June” and “ Thin gin”. I have no idea what those word meant and what was there meaning. Another thing that confused me was “ The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel”. I saw this at the beginning and at first thought it was a title but then I looked up more and realized that it wasn’t the case because I saw the actual title “We real cool” so I don’t know if the author wanted the reader to read this as a title or is it simply just apart of the poem.