Golden Shovel (symbol)
Though the pool hall is named the Golden Shovel, the name evokes the image of an actual object, a shovel plated with gold. A shovel portends death, burial, and erasure of history. Things are buried to be hidden from view, struck from the record, or disqualified as evidence. Moreover, a shovel is operated by a single person. So when someone is "digging their own grave," or "digging themselves into a hole," we can imagine their figurative self-destruction being carried out with a shovel.
The fact that this particular shovel is gold symbolizes the allure of vice. In other words, it is flashy and luxurious to skip school and drink gin, and it may feel as good as gold to look cool to one's peers, but the fact remains that the shovel, however good it looks, is still a shovel, and the players, no matter their reasoning, are still digging themselves into holes.
Pool (symbol)
The game of pool symbolizes the performance of masculinity and the competition of the young men amongst themselves to be the "coolest" despite their collective voice. By setting the poem in a pool hall and then rendering the scene as a general statement about young Black men growing up in U.S. cities, Brooks renders pool as a symbol of the ceaseless competition among men to be the "coolest" and "manliest" of men. Visually, the game of pool requires phallic tools, i.e. pool cues, to compete in an arena. The cues are the instruments of the game, and any success in pool is achieved by one's use of their cue.
