The poem “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar was written in 1893. The poem is about how people have to hide their thoughts and feelings by putting on a mask. The mask allows people to conceal their pain and suffering and act happy around others. This is based on the struggles that African Americans faced at the time and how they had to hide their true feelings. Dunbar uses his unique and engaging style, language, form, and structure to tell the story of the struggles African Americans faced during and after the Civil War. This poem is about how many people, mostly African Americans, are forced to put their actual thoughts and feelings behind a mask. They do this so that they can present a much more upbeat and happy appearance to the outside world. The first …show more content…
The second stanza is about how they should only let people see them in a happier state. It says “Nay, let them only see us, “while” (8). This shows that they only want to be seen when they have a mask on, and they don’t want their true emotions revealed. The third stanza is about how only some can see their failures, but everyone will see them triumph. In the poem it says “We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries” (10). This shows that only someone like God will see their cries, but everyone else will see their smiles. This poem is spoken by the author and it refers to a collective “we” as the characters. It shows how wide the concept of hiding true emotions really is and feeling the need to meet societal expectations. Dunabr uses a unique form and structure in this poem. The form of this poem is a lyric poem. It is a short, emotional poem that expresses personal thoughts and feelings. This allows for an impactful and concise expression of how people hide their emotions from the world. The structure of this poem is three stanzas with a consistent rhyme scheme. Each stanza has four lines with an ABAB rhyme
While exploring an unknown island and struggling to survive, a group of schoolboys reveal their primitive, barbarous identities in William Golding’s work, Lord of the Flies. Similarly, Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American poet, describes the hidden nature of individuals in order to protect themselves and conceal their pain. Golding’s novel and Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask,” both express masks as means of escaping reality and a source of strength; however, the pressures of society suppress the characters in Dunbar’s poem while the boys in Lord of the Flies unleash true feelings through their innate savageness.
The poem, "We Wear the Mask”, by Paul Laurence Dunbar is about separating Blacks people from the masks they wear. When Blacks wear their masks they are not simply hiding from their oppressor they are also hiding from themselves. This type of deceit cannot be repaid with material things. This debt can only be repaid through repentance and self-realization. The second stanza of “We Wear the Mask” tells Blacks whites should not know about their troubles. It would only give them leverage over Blacks. Black peoples’ pain and insecurities ought to be kept amongst themselves. There is no need for anyone outside the black race to know what lies beneath their masks. The third stanza turns to a divine being. Blacks look to god because he made them and is the only one that can understand them. They must wear their mask proudly. The world should stay in the dark about who they are. This poem is about Blacks knowing their place and staying in it. This is the only way they could be safe.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “We Wear the Mask.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007. Print
Angelou and Dunbar speak of hiding their true identities in the face of the world and it's adversity. Both authors speak to a communal mask that all men and women wear. Angelou and Dunbar suffer in their lives, so they must wear a mask to hide themselves from the glaring public eye, for the public cannot help them. The mask forms their identity to the world, but they themselves have a personal identity that only those truly close to them know of. In a wider sense, everyone wears a mask; hiding themselves from everyone else.
In the time of the Great Depression, many people were in moments of suffering and hardships. However, African American were facing moments of prejudice and segregation, that was sonly based on the color of their skin. In the novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper lee and the poem “We wear the mask” by Paul Lawrence Dumber, gave incite to those moments and how African Americans changed themselves to fit in to the white people society.
Written in iambic tetrameter and in the plain English verse, the writer continually bombards the reader, through continuous repetition, the idea that the Negro hid his emotions behind "The Mask. " This is done to emphasize a sense of deception and belief that the average negro is a happy soul, rather than a "tortured [one]" (p 918,11) as Dunbar implies. The first stanza in itself is a lament of the "Negro's" conditions as perceived by the world. It is a representation of the past, in that the past is the speaker's past lament of the mask, not a past event in history/time. The first two lines of the poem, "We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,-" (p 918,2) are incorporated to introduce the image White Americans see when visualizing the slave.
Throughout life, people put on a mask to hide their true selves from everyone around them. It’s always an appearance versus reality type of thing. Someone could pull themselves together quite well but in reality, they are worse. That is a common argument presented by F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Great Gatsby” and Paul Laurence Dunbar in the poem “We Wear the Mask.”
Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the first black poets in his time to confront the hypocrisy he saw around him. “We wear the mask” was one of his outstanding works that addressed racial injustices in American society. This poem was all about the assertion that “we wear the masks” to hide their true feeling. Yet, he goes on to emphasize that the ruthlessness of suffering and pain that these masks try to cover up because they had to keep all the pains by themselves without expressing. According to William Carroll, “The poem closes with a repetition of a sentiment stated earlier: ‘But let the world dream otherwise, / we wear the mask!’ The people show a dogged determination to keep the true nature of their sufferings to themselves and to present to others an outward show of happiness and lack of care. Surely, such insistence on deception must be motivated by powerful feelings resulting from terrifying experiences. Such were the experiences of many people enslaved in the United States before the birth of this poet” (1-2). Because of their racial appearance and experience in injustice society, they have to hide their feeling.
In the poem “Strange Fruit” the author uses many deadly situations to explain the severe pain these human beings were experiencing. “Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck” (Allan 9) is a symbol of even after death African-Americans were still experiencing pain. After one passes away they usually go to peace and God, but these people were left there on the trees lynched for animals like crows to eat them away because no one cared about them. Crows are a symbol of death because they eat rotten, dead, and leftover animals and flesh. Crows can also be symbolic to the Jim Crow Laws that were racial segregation laws targeting a particular race and culture of people. Another symbolic example is “Then the sudden smell of burning flesh” (Allan 8). This quote is so graphic and distasteful to hear people were on purposely being burned to death in gas chambers and in fires. This symbolizes so many different aspects like inhumanity, pain, violence, torment, and misery. Everyone has the right to live and they were killed with no real cause. Similarly, in “We Wear the Mask” the phrase “We wear the mask the grins and lies” (Dunbar 1) embodies the tragic and excruciating truth being covered up with a fake lie. In the mid 1960’s particular people were not allowed to voice or show their emotions, feelings, or ideas because they would be murdered. The mask was used to cover up the painful truth with a happy, positive
“We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson are two poems that depict how many people hide their feelings from others. The two poems are similar in theme, but are told from different points of view and differ in plot.
In the story "Battle Royal" the narrator's grandfather tells the family to undermind the whites with "yeses" and "grins", he also instructs them to "agree'em to death and destruction". The grandfather felt that in order to keep the family safe and also hold on to the oppression that scars them everyday, they should put on a mask. This will keep the white man pleased and the blacks could keep there self respect because as soon as the opportunity for social equality comes they'll go for it. This didn't seem like a bad idea but it was hard for the narrator to comprehend.
The mask is a form of deception or illusion. Sometimes, it can be worn as both. It hides the true emotions of slaves, keeping the slave master from knowing what is going on in their minds. The mask also allows the slave to have an identity without the master’s detection. The mask gives the illusion that the slave is exactly how the masters believe, ignorant, incapable of true emotion, and unable to think for themselves.
Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” is a lyric poem in which the point of attraction, the mask, represents the oppression and sadness held by African Americans in the late 19th century, around the time of slavery. As the poem progresses, Dunbar reveals the façade of the mask, portrayed in the third stanza where the speaker states, “But let the dream be otherwise” (13). The unreal character of the mask has played a significant role in the lives of African Americans, who pretend to put on a smile when they feel sad internally. This occasion, according to Dunbar, is the “debt we pay to human guile," meaning that their sadness is related to them deceiving others. Unlike his other poems, with its prevalent use of black dialect, Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” acts as “an apologia (or justification) for the minstrel quality of some of his dialect poems” (Desmet, Hart, and Miller 466).
"We Wear the Mask" by Paul Dunbar was published in the late 1800’s, a time when African-Americans, like Paul Dunbar, were treated very poorly and had access to very few rights. Many changes were occurring during this time, and individuals were having a difficult time coming to terms with them. African Americans in particular found themselves caught in a culture that was not suitable for them. Dunbar expresses these feelings in the tone, which is shown by misery, anger and unhappiness. He uses the metaphor of wearing a mask to express the overall oppression of African Americans in this time period. Dunbar uses a lot of figurative language throughout this poem. He uses the word "we" to speak for the entire African American population as well as his self. He does this because he is painfully aware of the status his own race is living in. Throughout this poem, Paul Dunbar illustrates the horrific injustices they had to undergo while "wearing the mask" to hide their true emotions behind a smile. I have chosen a few lines in the poem “We Wear the Mask” to break down and show what each line really means through this figurative language Dunbar uses. I chose to examine lines 1 through 11, and 14 and 15.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, dispatches the cold troubles of African Americans in the lyrical poem, "We Wear the Mask." In this poem, Dunbar links imagery, rhythm, rhyme, and word choice to in order to institute a connection to the reader. From reading the poem, one can infer that Mr. Dunbar is speaking in general, of the misery that many people keep concealed under a grin that they wear very well. But if one were to go further and take the time to research Mr. Dunbar’s selection of this piece and the era of which this poem was written, one would come to understand that this poem focuses entirely on Paul Laurence Dunbar’s viewpoints on racial prejudice and the struggle for equality for the African-American’s of his time period. Though this analysis is not based on the meaning of this poem, it is necessary that in order to demonstrate the sound of analysis, one must first understand the poem.