In Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "We Real Cool" the tone is arrogant and depressing. This is amplified throughout the poem as the speakers express how "cool" they are by different means and then dying.
The first line in which the poem starts out in is stating that the speakers are cool, then the following lines suggest how this is so. The speakers say that they dropped out of school, didnt do very much with their lives but hang around. They got invovled in playing pool and got drunk. This poem is arrogant because they believed they were to cool for everything; to finish school and make something of their lives but instead they chose to take the easy road and become nothing. The poem takes a depressing turn closer to the end when it says "We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon." my reasoning for this is because it shows that they are glorifying sin , getting drunk contineously, and realizing that they are going to die. After reading the poem you can connected the title to the poem very easily by saying they were arrogant for thinking all of the things they did made them cool.
Katarina,
ReplyDeleteYou say this poem is arrogant and depressing but those are not easily reconciled tones. This is partly because of some ambiguity around the word "depressing." By it, do you mean that the poem makes you (or any reader) depressed, or that it expresses the depression of the speaker, or that it expresses the depression of the poet? Or all at once?
It might be helpful to distinguish more clearly, both for yourself and for your readers, between the tone of the POEM and the tone of the SPEAKERS. It would also be helpful to provide more of a sense of scope in your introduction. Do you intend to argue that the tone changes or that it is consistent? How will you be forming your argument?