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.