Writer's Notebook

"We Real Cool"-- Gwendolyn Brooks

"We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk Late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon."

This poem is very simplistic, but has a powerful meaning behind it. One thing that I get out of this poem is that if the narrator continues on this path of destruction then death is inevitable. He describes the things that he does, the things that he thinks make him cool, but instead his actions are only getting him in trouble. The dialect reminds me of someone in the inner city involved in the wrong crowd. It is interesting that he uses the word "we" instead of "I" which leads the reader to believe that his peers are involved. Maybe this poem shows the negatives of peer pressure, and what happens if you are more concerned about "we" instead of "me."

One thing that I want to take from this poem is the repetition of a certain word, in this case the word "we". It makes the poem more focused and puts all the attention on one subject. But I would also like to take the rhyme scheme from this poem. I love the fact how the rhyme is not found at the end of every line, which is the conventional rhyming technique. Instead the line is ended by the repetition of the word "we" and the rhyme is found within the line.