-
Essay / Literary Analysis of We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks
Throughout his or her life, he or she may find himself spending time with the wrong people. Fortunately, most intelligent men and women will be able to distance themselves from these irresponsible and juvenile groups and lead successful lives. But what about adults who never grew up? The unfortunate thing is that hundreds of thousands of people have wasted their days as their lives collapse. In Gwendolyn Brooks' poem, We Real Cool, she is able to talk about a group of people who have made a series of bad decisions, ultimately leading to their untimely deaths. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essay Gwendolyn Brooks, an African-American poet born June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, is an accomplished poet whose works typically detail the struggles and triumphs of the people who lived in his community. When she was six weeks old, Gwendolyn's family moved to Chicago; As a child growing up in Chicago during the Great Depression, it is likely that the bleak and desperate environment Brooks grew up in influenced some of his poems such as We Real Cool, a poem about a group of unemployed boys who die earlier. than expected. In the poem, Gwendolyn talks about children who dropped out of school, stayed out late, drank frequently, and "died soon." On a superficial level, Brooks effectively tells a ballad in four short stanzas. These childish men are perfect examples of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken." As the title suggests, these young men think they are cool, they have made the decision to submit to life's challenges and run away from them. They chose to take the easier path, following their peers into a life even lower than mediocrity. Digging deeper, this poem reveals itself to be about life on the fast lane and its consequences. Perhaps the poem is not only a story, but also a lesson about the consequences of ignoring one's responsibilities as a maturing adult. Although there are slight differences in the plot, it can be noted that the themes of this poem are similar to those of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, a story about which the popular film was released only a few years before the publication of We Real Cool. While the entire lives of classic Neverland characters take place beyond adulthood; Gwendolyn shows us that the real world doesn't work the same way; these young men in his story are the Lost Boys of Peter Pan, but unfortunately they are far from immortal and will have to deal with the consequences of their prolonged childhood. One of the most interesting aspects of We Real Cool is Gwendolyn Brooks' use of literary devices and the strategies she orchestrated using them. In each stanza of the poem, each word is connected. In the first line, the repetition of a long "e" is a technique called assonance; Additionally, Brooks repeats the "l" sound in "real" and "cool", using another technique called consonance. Moving to the second line, Gwendolyn connects "left" and "school" with the "l" sound they both share in a literary device called slant rhyme. In the second line, the "l" sound is again used in alliteration with the words "lurk" and "late" from the third line; alliteration is also used in line four with the words "strike" and "Straight" in lines five and six with "sin" and "Thin" and the "j" sound in the word "gin" is repeated in the words “Jazz” and “June”. “June” also forms a base rhyme with the word “soon” in line eight. A reader might wonder at this point how it./