Student Question
What is the effect of alliteration, assonance, and rhyme in the poem "We Real Cool"?
Quick answer:
The effect of the figures of speech and rhyme in the poem "We Real Cool" is to emphasize its rhythm and musicality, both associated with jazz music. Further, all of the rhymes and devices isolate the final line of the poem, both in terms of sound and rhythm, emphasizing the poem's message that death always comes before we are ready.
Yes, there are a great many musical devices in the poem, which is quite fitting as the speaker does mention "Jazz" in the penultimate line. Also, we get the sense that the speaker is young, as a result of their admission that they "left school"—perhaps for the summer or perhaps they dropped out—and very often youth culture is really tuned in, so to speak, to popular music. The rhythm created by placing the word "we" at the end of each line (which would be followed by a pause) and the use of enjambment (when the sentence continues onto the next line), seems to mimic a jazz beat.
Further, rhymes like "cool" and "school," "late" and "straight," "sin" and "thin" and "gin," and "June" and "soon" add to the musicality of the poem. Moreover, there is slant rhyme with the repeated "L" sound in the first stanza, which connects it to the "L" alliteration of the second stanza; then, there is consonance with the "K" sound in "lurk" and "strike" and alliteration in "sing" and "sin" in the third stanza.
Alliteration of the "J" sound connects "gin" to "jazz" and "June" in the third and fourth stanzas. In short, every word in the poem is somehow connected, via shared sounds, to the words around it except for "Die" in the final stanza. This draws extra attention to that one word, and the lack of "we" at the end of the last line emphasizes its finality much more. We expect to hear that "we," and so the rhythm feels cut off—much like the life of the speaker.
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