Analysis Of 'We Real Cool' By Gwendolyn Brooks

In the world of Literature and Poetry there is the writer and the poet and then there is the speaker. The speaker is the persona that communicates for the writer or poet. The speaker sets the tone for the poem and helps the reader to better understand the message or theme that the poet wishes to convey through their lines and stanzas. Poets may create and utilize a speaker when they wish to have their poem expressed from a different view point than their own personal perspective. The speaker in a poem does not necessarily always have to be the same race, gender or species as the poet. In the broadcast “Stealing Fire From the Cold Lions”, poet Angela Jackson reads a number of her works, the first poem Jackson reads in the broadcast is a poem …show more content…
The poem is about a group of seven young boys, seemingly African American as the poem is spoken in African American Vernacular English, who have left school and are hanging out at a pool hall called “the Golden Shovel”. The poem illustrates the issues of a “herd mentality” in society which dictates how people act and what they do in a certain society. In the poem, the speaker’s voice is the collective group of boys saying “We real cool. We left School. We die soon”. Brooks uses the young boy’s voices as a group to convey the attitude of most young men. Young men are cool and casual, they go with the group. Brooks uses the collective voice of the young boys because the poem is about how the boys do everything together; there is no one decision or one leader of the group. The speakers in the poem exemplify the lack of choices in society; there is no choice in “we”. The speakers think together and act together. This message would be much harder for Brooks to convey if she was writing from her own personal perspective, having a speaker is a way for Brooks to give the reader a point of view from inside the group of …show more content…
In “The Panther” the speaker’s point of view is from that of a panther that is trapped, pacing behind bars in a zoo in Paris, France. This poem has a very clear message that the panther does not enjoy being trapped in the zoo but the point of view from which it is told is what makes it interesting. In every zoo there is the view of the human who is entertained watching the animal and the point of view of the animal. In the poem, the speaker is a male panther whose “vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else”. This perspective tells the reader that the panther has been in captivity for a very long time and spends most of his time pacing back and forth looking out through the bars from his cage. The point of view from which Rilke writes gives the reader a perspective that they could never understand just by simply watching the panther pace in the zoo. The poet dares to enter the panthers mind, creating a speaker. The panther as a speaker gives us, the reader and zoo goer, a clear and irrefutable evidence that he is miserable in