Kids, Stay in School
Have you ever felt like you can do anything that came to mind and suffer no consequences? Probably at a younger age. And many of us, as we get older, judge and criticise the kids around us for being rebellious. Gwendolyn Brooks took a different approach. Ms. Brooks is a poet who is known as the first black author taking home the Pulitzer price. Her work in poetry focused mainly on civil rights activism. In one of her works, she speaks of teenage boys avoiding school. Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “We Real Cool”, conveys that giving up school for a status quo will have a negative impact in one’s life. This message will further be explained through the aspects of the poem, sound devices and imagery. The poem speaks of consequences that take place when one lives a lifestyle filled with selfish acts. These acts grant them temporary satisfaction. This theme is explained through the form of the poem. The piece takes the poetic form of a couplet with internal rhyming. The poem contains “We” at the end of each line giving the verbs following the pronoun a certain weight as to what actions the teenage boys …show more content…
For the header of the poem, the poet uses the word “shovel” when the default word should have been “cue stick”: “The pool players. /Seven at the Golden Shovel”. This quote can be understood if we read the last line of the poem: “Die soon” (line 8). The imagery is that the youngster chose to destroy their lives by skipping school to play pool. The group represents the road they chose over school, the game of pool represents what they do in the meantime or all actions they have taken and finally the cue stick represents them striking straight to their last action leading them to death. The golden shovel represents the cue stick that will the first step to their bad
Have you ever felt like you can do anything that came to mind and suffer no consequences? Probably at a younger age. And many of us, as we get older, judge and criticise the kids around us for being rebellious. Gwendolyn Brooks took a different approach. Ms. Brooks is a poet who is known as the first black author taking home the Pulitzer price. Her work in poetry focused mainly on civil rights activism. In one of her works, she speaks of teenage boys avoiding school. Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “We Real Cool”, conveys that giving up school for a status quo will have a negative impact in one’s life. This message will further be explained through the aspects of the poem, sound devices and imagery. The poem speaks of consequences that take place when one lives a lifestyle filled with selfish acts. These acts grant them temporary satisfaction. This theme is explained through the form of the poem. The piece takes the poetic form of a couplet with internal rhyming. The poem contains “We” at the end of each line giving the verbs following the pronoun a certain weight as to what actions the teenage boys …show more content…
For the header of the poem, the poet uses the word “shovel” when the default word should have been “cue stick”: “The pool players. /Seven at the Golden Shovel”. This quote can be understood if we read the last line of the poem: “Die soon” (line 8). The imagery is that the youngster chose to destroy their lives by skipping school to play pool. The group represents the road they chose over school, the game of pool represents what they do in the meantime or all actions they have taken and finally the cue stick represents them striking straight to their last action leading them to death. The golden shovel represents the cue stick that will the first step to their bad