We Wear The Mask By Edwin Robinson And Paul Dunbar

Hiding our sadness and fears, lying to the people we love, keeping our emotions to ourselves, all things that everyone does, sometimes without even knowing. Edwin Robinson and Paul Dunbar are two poets who have wrote about how everyone is fighting a battle that you may know nothing about, so you should be kind to people, always. “Richard Cory,” by Edwin Robinson and “We Wear The Mask,” by Paul Dunbar both traditional poems that express that sadness that people hide and the act that we put on for the people surrounding us. Yet they both talk about different scenarios, one that involves money and admiration, and another that speaks of hiding your true feelings from people. “Richard Cory,” by Edwin Robinson is a poem about a man that seems to have everything yet is not truly happy. The character in the poem, Richard Cory, is a good-looking, wealthy, educated and mannerly man that the town’s people
“We Wear The Mask,” was made out to be about the African American’s hiding their anger and pain from the whites at the time. Dunbar writes in a iambic pentameter, meaning he pairs unstressed and stressed syllables, giving the reading a more meaningful feeling as you read it. He rhymes using couplets throughout the entire poem, rhyming “lies” and “eyes,” “guile” and “smile,” showing the contrast between the two. The rhyming scheme that Dunbar uses makes reading this poem very fluent and easy. Dunbar also uses metaphors when he says, “with torn and bleeding hearts we smile.” Throughout this entire poem, Dunbar uses many figurative devices to get his point across; his point is that we wear a mask to cover our sadness and we lie to avoid telling people what we are truly going through. Especially when Dunbar refrains, “we wear the mask,” to really make it prominent in the readers mind. “We Wear The Mask,” is a traditional structured poem with set stanzas and a repeated rhyming