We Wear The Mask Poem

“We wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar talks about people, especially African Americans who are forced to wear a mask to cover their faces and hide their true feelings behind the mask. The poem talks about people who have been tortured and choose to conceal their pain and frustrations behind a mask. They refuse to allow the world to see their pain instead, they want the world to only see their mask of contentment. The summary, symbolism, figurative language, poetry devices help understand the poem’s message.

In the first stanza of the poem, the writer writes about how people use masks to hide their real feelings. The poem talks about how the mask hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, which implies that if the mask shades our eyes, then

There was a lack of civil right and African Americans had to behave or they would be punished or killed. The nineteenth century was a rough time to be black in America. This era forced African Americans to conceal their emotions and wear a mask to disguise their true emotions and also avoid being punished.

We Wear the Mask contents some symbolism in its stanzas. The mask in this poem is used as deception. The mask refers to the emotions that people pretend to wear to conceal the emotions that they truly feel. People use smiles and happiness as untrue expressions to cover their pain and cries. Smiles in the poem also symbolize wearing a mask. It is an expression used to cover up real emotions in the poem. Another symbolism occurs in line fourteen. It says “Beneath our feet, and long the mile” (Dunbar, line 14). This line expresses how far African Americans have come and the long struggles on the

Refrain emerges in the poem. The most obvious refrain is “We wear the mask” This appears once in every stanza of this poem. It is also the title of this poem which explains why it appears in all of the stanzas to prove a point. Another repetition that occurs in the poem is “we smile”. These words appear twice in the poem. In the poem, smile represents wearing a mask. This means that we smile represent a group of people wearing masks to reflect false expression. One type of sound device that materializes in the poem is alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. These devices emerge in the fifth line of the poem. It says “And mouth with myriad subtleties” (Dunbar, line 5). The alliteration in this line is mouth and myriad because they sound similar and the initial consonant repeat in the neighboring word. Other repeating words in this poem are mask and world. These are some of the repetitions and sound devices found in the