Eight line, eight line is the length of the poem “We Real Cool”, but it is loaded with literary devises and contains an underlining meaning. This poem titled “We Real Cool” is written by Gwendolyn Brooks and it was published in 1960. The title is ironic because one would think the poem would be about a group of people and their flamboyant, cool lifestyle but the poem explains that this lifestyle is a dead end that leads to death. It is also interesting to note that the vowels sounds of the title and the first line of the poem go from high to middle to low. This poem describes seven pool players who are skipping school to do things they consider to be cool, but it ends with “We / Die soon” (lines 7-8) which leaves the reader puzzled and pondering …show more content…
The repetition of the word “We” along with the fact that it is an enjambment, standing along at the end of each line, reinforces group identity. The group is the pool players and the identity is that they want to be defined by their rebellious acts. These rebellious acts are described in the following alliterations: “Lurk late” (line 3), “Sing sin” (line 5), and “Jazz June” (line 7). “Lurk late” (line 3) means they say out late because they don't have a job or school to wake up early for. “Sing sin” (line 5) refers to them flaunting their cool but sinful lives to the world. “Jazz” (line 7) alludes to freedom and dancing while “June” (line 7) could be the name of a girl referring to seduction and alcohol. All of these ideas and references displays what the pool players know to be cool but in the end this lifestyle comes crashing down in the final line when it says “We / Die soon” (lines 7-8). “We” is the group of cool pool people who do everything alike including, as this line describes, dying soon adding to the theme of mortality. Repetition and alliteration both play a pivotal role in combining ideas into relative concepts the contribute to Brooks’
The next line indicates that the pool players are very rebellious. In the lines, “We lurk late. We strike straight,” (l.2-4) we are made aware that
All eight stanzas Lee wrote combine to inform readers his experience of grief and how it went from beginning to end. In the beginning, Lee opens readers with his vision of life, which is everyone are circuit boards, who absorb the electricity of life. In other words, Lee is explaining how every person’s life goes, but it always comes to an end at some point. From Lee’s life, he has lost a friend as stated before named Stephen. “Pass On” then looks back at the memories of Stephen such as, how he enjoyed dribbling the basketball or singing his favorite songs. However, Lee begins to realize he should not mourn over his loss nor grieve as he looks back at memories, but instead find Stephen. Near the end of “Pass On” and Lee’s journey concluding, he believes that Stephen and everyone else who is not physically alive are in the breeze of the wind. More specifically, whenever someone feels a strong breeze of wind, a loved one of theirs is most likely right beside them. Furthermore, Stephen and everyone else dead are not only in the wind, but indirectly in people you see every day. With Lee, after nine years of searching for Stephen he has found him in Wilt Chamberlain, who plays basketball, his voice in a musical young boy who sings, and his smile in a young girl’s shinning teeth. With Lee’s beliefs and his own
The poem “Always Something More Beautiful” by Stephen Dunn is certainly about running a race, but the speaker is also arguing that pursuing something beautiful can help guide us through life. Through the title, we can see that we should constantly look for more beautiful things in life. The poem begins with the speaker describing his experience before a race. He uses words like “best” and “love.” The tone is extremely enthusiastic. In the first line, he talks about coming to the starting place. This can be a metaphor for beginning our lifelong journey. The speaker also implies that we need to approach it with a positive attitude. In the next few lines, the speaker indicates being tested in excellence
In Drea Knufken’s essay entitled “Help, We’re Drowning!: Please Pay Attention to Our Disaster,” the horrific Colorado flood is experienced and the reactions of worldly citizens are examined (510-512). The author’s tone for this formal essay seems to be quite reflective, shifting to a tone of frustration and even disappointment. Knufken has a reflective tone especially during the first few paragraphs of the essay. According to Drea Knufken, a freelance writer, ghostwriter and editor, “when many of my out-of-town friends, family and colleagues reacted to the flood with a torrent of indifference, I realized something. As a society, we’ve acquired an immunity to crisis. We scan through headlines without understanding how stories impact people,
The death camp was a terrible place where people where killed. Hitler is who created the death camp for Jews. The death camp was used for extermination on Jews. This occurred on 1939 – 1945. The death camps were in the country of Europe. Hitler did all this because he didn’t like Jews and the religions. The book Night is a autobiography written by Elie Wiesel. The poem called First they came for the communist written by Martin Neimoller is a autobiography.
In “We Real Cool,” by Gwendolyn Brooks, one can almost visualize a cool cat snapping his fingers to the beat, while she is reading this hip poem. Her powerful poem uses only a few descriptive words to conjure up a gang of rebellious teens. Brooks employs a modern approach to the English language and her choice of slang creates a powerful jazz mood. All of the lines are very short and the sound on each stop really pops. Brooks uses a few rhymes to craft an effective sound and image of the life she perceives. With these devices she manages to take full control of her rhyme and cultivates a morally inspiring poem.
“Silence is a sounding thing, to one who listens hungrily.” Gwendolyn B. Bennett was an author, journalist, educator, and artists. She was a woman of the Harlem Renaissance. But despite all the struggles of being an African American woman, Gwendolyn B. Bennett made herself into the woman she was in the 1900s. Therefore, the strong woman she became is shown through her work.
One of the great things about Composition and Literature is that the readings can relate to many other topics outside of the class. The poems and the stories read in this class give a more in depth look at a specific subject and give a clearer picture of what life was like and how people lived at that time. In most classes about U.S. History, the sections taught on segregation don’t give specific examples of how people were treated or the perspectives of the people who were mistreated. However, reading Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry in the Composition and Literature course gives students an opportunity to learn greater details about segregation through the perspectives of the people most affected by it and the
Patricia Young’s poem Boys is a representation of implied heteronormacy in society. Young uses tropes and schemes such as allusion, metaphors and irony to convey the ways in which heterosexuality is pushed onto children from a young age. Poetry such as Boys is a common and effective medium to draw attention to the way society produces heteronormativity through gendered discourses that are typically used to understand sex. Boys does an excellent job at drawing its readers to the conclusion that it is an ironic poem trying to emphasize the over-excessive ways in which we express heterosexuality in daily life.
Cummings uses the seasons, bells, his unique composition and the repetition of “Women and men” and “anyone” to create and emphasize the unfortunate cycle of life. The use of the seasons in lines three,eleven, and thirty-four emphasise the passing of time and the unchanging ways of the townspeople. “Women and men”, in lines five and thirty-three,are used to remind us of Cummings definition of “most people” and how people tend to blend in and follow. The bells in lines two and twenty-four are used to indicate a change in the character 's, the first bell is before love and the second bell is rang before death. These significant life transitions show how love and death are final.
When sorting through the Poems of Dorothy Parker you will seldom find a poem tha¬t you could describe as uplifting or cheerful. She speaks with a voice that doesn’t romanticize reality and some may even call her as pessimistic. Though she doesn’t have a buoyant writing style, I can empathize with her views on the challenges of life and love. We have all had experiences where a first bad impression can change how we view an opportunity to do the same thing again. Parker mostly writes in a satirical or sarcastic tone, which can be very entertaining to read and analyze.
This darkly satiric poem is about cultural imperialism. Dawe uses an extended metaphor: the mother is America and the child represents a younger, developing nation, which is slowly being imbued with American value systems. The figure of a mother becomes synonymous with the United States. Even this most basic of human relationships has been perverted by the consumer culture. The poem begins with the seemingly positive statement of fact 'She loves him ...’. The punctuation however creates a feeling of unease, that all is not as it seems, that there is a subtext that qualifies this apparently natural emotional attachment. From the outset it is established that the child has no real choice, that he must accept the 'beneficence of that motherhood', that the nature of relationships will always be one where the more powerful figure exerts control over the less developed, weaker being. The verb 'beamed' suggests powerful sunlight, the emotional power of the dominant person: the mother. The stanza concludes with a rhetorical question, as if undeniably the child must accept the mother's gift of love. Dawe then moves on to examine the nature of that form of maternal love. The second stanza deals with the way that the mother comforts the child, 'Shoosh ... shoosh ... whenever a vague passing spasm of loss troubles him'. The alliterative description of her 'fat friendly features' suggests comfort and warmth. In this world pain is repressed, real emotion pacified, in order to maintain the illusion that the world is perfect. One must not question the wisdom of the omnipotent mother figure. The phrase 'She loves him...' is repeated. This action of loving is seen as protecting, insulating the child. In much the same way our consumer cultur...
Robinson uses the symbolism and irony to quietly warn the perceptive reader of Mr. Flood's death. Robinson quietly references problems that he sees in society, and addresses them with subtleness. But, those who don't pick up on the symbolism and irony will not understand the delicate and precisely planned intricacies of the poem, and how it is upsettingly non-ironic in the end.
Robert Creeley, a famous American poet, lived from 1926 to 2005. Creeley was normally associated as a Black Mountain poet because that is where he taught, and spent most of his career. Throughout his life, Creeley wrote many different pieces of poetry. Four great poems by Robert Creeley are, “For Love”, “Oh No”, “The Mirror”, and “The Rain”. The poem “For Love”,was written by Creeley for his wife. In this poem Creeley explains, the love someone has for another person, and how complicated it is making his life because the person doesn’t know how to explain their love. “Oh No” is a poem that is literally about a selfish person who ended up in hell, but this poem has a deeper meaning. Part
Did I Miss Anything? is a poem written by a Canadian poet and academic Tom Wayman. Being a teacher, he creates a piece of literature, where he considers the answers given by a teacher on one and the same question asked by a student, who frequently misses a class. So, there are two speakers present in it – a teacher and a student. The first one is fully presented in the poem and the second one exists only in the title of it. The speakers immediately place the reader in the appropriate setting, where the actions of a poem take place – a regular classroom. Moreover, the speakers unfolds the main theme of the poem – a hardship of being a teacher, the importance of education and laziness, indifference and careless attitudes of a student towards studying.