We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.
For this poem, I wanted to focus not only on TPCASTT, like the title and summary of the poem, but also on the foot and meters. “We Real Cool” is told from first person point of view, but I was still left confused as to who “we” and who the speaker actually is. The only thing that I was able to figure out was that this was a story about kids spending time together and making amazing memories. The actual material of this poem is treated symbolically. Some of the symbols I noticed were gin. Gin represents the livelihood of the young adults within the poem. It’s no doubt that since these kids are skipping school and drinking alcohol and generally doing things that most adults would frown upon makes them “cool.” I researched when this poem was written, 1959, and that’s the beauty in literature and poetry-this poem can still be considered relevant in today’s world.
As far as the foot and meters go, I looked at each separate sentence rather than each line as a meter, and I found that it is a trimeter. I had the same troubles I had with my homework on foot and meters, which was finding what part of the words are accented. After saying the lines repeatedly, I found that “We Real Cool” is written in amphibrachic.
This is a good reading. You capture the idea that the kids in the poem think they are cool and are making amazing memories, but the adults might frown upon it.
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