Poem Analysis: We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks and The Schooner Flight by Derek Walcott - Essay Example

We real cool is a poem of only eight lines long and, therefore, easy to analyze and understand. The poem is all about some young boys playing pool in a pool house with an impression of how bad they are. The poem in its setting is in a neighborhood with the ‘Golden Shovel’ the pool house, which seems cool from the rest of the other areas. Around the tables is a group of boys perceived to be a gang in how they behave after dropping out of school. The boys seem to find a means of survival and it is quite evident in how the setting is brought into perspective. The name of the pool house, “Golden Shovel” means a short life expectancy for crime involvement, and the real-life seven boys' experience is fully aligned with this projection.

The schooner flight” by Derek Walcott unlike ‘We real cool’ brings about majorly the theme of imagination, which in itself brings about the theme of personal experiences. This is mainly expressed in the manner in which Walcott reacts to the Shabine character both through connecting and sympathizing. Ideally, through the character Shabine, Walcott brings about a real picture of himself. Unlike “We real cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks, which has only eight lines, “The Schooner Flight by Derek Walcott, has five hundred lines divided into eleven different sections each having varying lengths.

Derek Walcott in his poem uses a first-person voice through the character of Sabine. Through this voice, Walcott narrates his life experiences through Shabine the poetic character, from which the audience can understand better the life of Walcott. However, in the poem “We real cool” by Brooks, she makes a narration of the situation that school dropouts undergo at a younger age, and how they spend their time. One fundamental difference between these two poems is that whereas Brooks establishes her poem on mere imagination of a particular situation, Walcott establishes his poem on a real-life experience.

The two poems also have a similarity in some aspects of their literary perspectives. The major similarity is seen in the thematic aspect of the poems, in which they share the theme of pride. In “We real cool,” pride is significantly evident in the boys who take pride in themselves despite the aimless lives they live. In a similar perspective, the poem Schooner Flight has a thematic aspect of pride in which Walcott the poet takes pride in narrating his life experience though through a different character Sabine.