"The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel."
Analysis
This first stanza serves as a scene-setting device and character list for the main body of the poem. By capitalizing the words in the style of a title, Brooks transforms the entire phrase into one proper noun, thus communicating to her reader that this whole first stanza refers to a collective character—the young men in the pool hall.
The name of the pool hall, "the Golden Shovel," strongly suggests a fatalism about the young men's conditions. A shovel's sole use, to dig holes, contains the figurative connotation of "digging oneself into a hole," which is another way of saying that one is creating a difficult situation for oneself or making one's already-difficult situation even more difficult. Then there is the most fatal type of hole, a grave. The Golden Shovel evokes the image of a grave with the help of the poem's final lines, "We / Die soon."
The fact that the shovel itself is golden suggests a romanticism and glorification of the young men's lifestyles. They are young, and they might see these years of drinking and skipping school as their golden years. They focus on enjoying themselves and putting on a stylish front of "coolness," but this lifestyle concurrently buries them deeper into their fate and into a narrative imposed upon them by predominantly white power structures.
