Reading Response to the Poem The Pool Players - Essay Example

The poem clearly depicts that the speakers chose to discontinue their education and stays up late in the evening at the pool hall. The visual imagery coupled with the lyrical form of the poem balances the literary work by providing rhythm to the poem despite the apparent hopelessness of the speakers in their status in the society. The tone, language and rhyme also contribute to the efficacy of conveying the message of the poem to the readers. The tone of boasting and despair are evident in the lines that say, “We Left school.

” and “We Die soon.” showing that the speakers chose to drop-out of school to play at the pool hall instead or for some other unspecified reasons accepting without any choice that the inevitable end of their hopelessness is death. Brooks’ use of figurative language also symbolizes the activities of the speakers. In the lines “We Sing sin.” and “We Jazz June”, the poet does not literally mean that the characters sing their sins or are they jazzing the month of June. These metaphors used in the line “We Sing sin.

” represent that the speakers acknowledge that they were sinning or mistaken for choosing to stay the whole day at the pool hall instead of going to school. The line “We Jazz June” may possibly mean that they were playing jazz instead of studying or possibly mean that whole year was laid-back because they had dropped-out from school. Rhyme in the poem is also important in creating the lyrical form and capture the attention of readers. Slant rhymes and alliteration can be seen in the poem.

Slant rhymes are lines from the poem that end with the words sin and gin; cool and school; late and straight; sin and gin; and June and soon. Alliteration is evident in every line with “We” since the letter “W” is repeated throughout the entire poem. The rhymes help the audience to smoothly read the poem despite the denseness of the speakers’ situation. The smooth rhyming words also add to the irony of the poem. Aside from the rhyming words in contrast to the theme of the poem, the lines that are ironical are “We real cool.

” and “We Die soon.” since the “We” who claim that they are cool people are actually hopeless which is evident in the last line of the poem saying, “We Die soon.” Written in the 1950s, the poem Pool Players was created by Brooks upon seeing a group of boys while passing by a billiard hall in Chicago (Gayles, 2003, p. 130). Although the poem did not mention directly that pool halls during the 1950s are not socially accepted because of being one of the venues for gambling (Hughes, 2012, pp. 70-71), the poetry elements used by the author depicted that the speakers in the poem are not valued in the society and were looked down upon by people.

In my perspective, the poem reflects and narrates the predicament of the pool players despite the shortness of the verse. The status of the speakers in the society was conveyed by the elements of the poem clearly and compensates the length of the literary work. In its entirety, the poem did not merely introduce the pool players and the carefree manner of their lives but it also addressed the social problems of Black-Americans in the country during the time the poem was completed.