We Real Cool

The poem begins with two lines entirely in capitalized letters. These brief lines—both incomplete sentences—resemble either stage directions in the text of a play or alternate titles for the poem, establishing context and character: seven young men playing pool in a place called The Golden Shovel. The lines contain no emotion; they simply state the fact of the boys’ existence and location, and the matter-of-fact tone establishes the catalog of activities to follow. This grim start to the poem does little to prepare the reader, or the listener, of the poem for the final line of the poem that, in three short words, portends the boys’ early deaths.

The dominant portion of the poem begins with the most repeated word in the poem: the first person plural speaker, “We.” In Brooks’s take on the persona poem—a poem in which a poet speaks in a particular character’s voice—the seven players speak as one. Their collective voice suggests that they are members of a voluntary brotherhood, a group of friends who, together, can find safety and comfort in numbers. Together, they chant the lines of the poem, as if they are reciting an anthem or an oath to one another, emphasizing their isolation from the larger community around them.

The word “we” stands out for its repetition.  ”We” hangs at the end of nearly every line, ensuring a hypnotic yet suspenseful quality as a reader hinges from one line to the next to find out what detail each sequential “we” will reveal about the speakers. If one reads the poem aloud and takes a breath at the end of each line, there is a sense that the speakers look around at each other after each “we,” as if to consider what they will reveal about themselves next. The musicality of this repetition works with the line breaks of the poem to create an improvised sound that contrasts with the orderly world of adults and mainstream society. The boys, young and bored, seek to escape the tedium of school and the authority of grown-ups who challenge their adolescent desire for autonomy.

The young men chant of rebellion and reckless fun. They play pool, skip class, drink, and stay out as late as they can. However, they transition from these assertions—the majority of which are stated with present-tense verbs—to a prediction of doom. The inevitability of early death, stated in the final line, boldly and without sentimentality, draws the poem to a sinister close, emphasizing the futility of the boys’ lives. The poet suggests with the finality of this ending that their youthful antics, in this particular moment in time, are all they have. Life seems to promise boys, like the ones at the Golden Shovel, little more than a brief experience seeking immature distraction from the unavoidable adult suffering that exists beyond the walls of the pool hall. The poem, and the duration of the boys’ lives, ends abruptly, with three mono-syllabic words. Just as the boys’ lives are overly brief, so is the poem, making it a lyrical symbol of the unjust brevity of life for these specific individuals at this moment in time.