We Real Cool Analysis Essay

Short Lives The poems “For A Lady I Know” by Countee Cullen and “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks are two completely different poems. The poems themselves have different prosody, and message. The “For A Lady I Know” poem says “We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz june. We Die soon” (Brooks 639). In “We Real Cool” the poem says “She even thinks that up in heaven Her class lies late and snores, While poor black cherubs rise at seven To do celestial chores” (Cullen 936). Just like the poems “For A Lady I Know” and “We Real Cool” have differences, they also have some similarities. The differences of these poems are more than their similarities. “We Real Cool” has punctuation and “For A Lady I Know” doesn’t have punctuation but a comma to separate the first two lines with the last two lines. In Cullen’s poem there is only one stanza, on the other hand, Brooks’ poem has four stanzas and one syllable for each word. “We Real Cool” poem also seems to refer to a young crowd since it states “We Left School” (Cullen 5) and usually younger people are the ones attending school. In “For A Lady I Know” the poem is referring to a social class and race. For example, when it says “Her class lies late and snores,” (Cullen 2) and “While

In “We Real Cool” it states “We Die soon” (Brooks 8) after listing a few entertaining things “We” did to be “real cool” (Brooks 1). I also think that the narrator said that to show how life is too short not to do things that are “cool” (Brooks 1), or out of someone’s comfort zone because before you know it you are dead without living life to its full extent. In “For A Lady I Know” in the first line the narrator says “She even thinks that up in heaven” in which one can conclude that after death she believes there is an afterlife. The poems cherish life even if “We Real Cool” is the current life and “For A Lady I Know” is the