We Real Cool Poem Analysis

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Poetry and drama have a few key features that emphasize their per formative nature. One is the use of rhyme, rhythm, meter, alliteration, and other types of sound symbolism. For example, in Gwendolyn Brooks' "We real cool", the poet uses a strong rhyme scheme, a consistent meter, and an almost sing-song tone to demonstrate the lack of education of the narrator and his or her youthfulness. It also emphasizes the last line "We die soon.". Another is in "unity of action". Both drama and poetry tend to be focused on a single action, plotline, and main protagonist. In contrast, a novel might be more "epic" in nature, spanning multiple continents, historical eras, and plotlines. For instance, in a play like Ibsen's "A Doll's House", all the action…show more content…
All throughout the poem, the speaker addresses this woman in a kind of mini-drama in which only one voice is heard. (Browning uses much the same technique in "My Last Duchess"). In "The Flea," however, the woman responds through her actions if not through her words, thereby making the poem even more dramatic. Some poems actually contain dialogue between two or more characters, thus making them even more dramatic in the literal sense of the word. Some of the poems in the final third of Edmund SpenserAmoretti sonnet sequence display this feature. Some poems by the same author are paired, allowing one character to make a statement in one poem and then allowing another character to reply in an accompanying work. For example, in the poem "Wrapt in my careless cloak," by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a dsigruntled man complains about the behavior of women, while in an accompanying poem titled "Girt in my guiltless gown," a woman replies to the man's charges. Of course, another way in which lyric poems can be performative is that they almost demand to be read aloud if one hopes to appreciate all their subtleties of sound and sense. This is less true of novels, and reading an entire novel out loud is therefore not something that most people do (at least not any
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