We Wear the Mask

“We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

In the first verse, the mask is taken off. The “We” of the poem describes the black community that lives a double life, the masked and the unmasked. Dunbar included the word “mask” in his poem because historically it was a false deceptive role-playing that was acceptable for a survival strategy by blacks and it maintained a sense of empowerment in a racial society. The word “lies” is a simple word but the mask not only lies to the whites, but to

. . .

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise. The words “clay is vile” sets the setting for slavery on a plantation in the south where clay is popular. The plantation is where they worked and lived.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

In the words “We smile”, it shows that they wear their smiling mask everyday with tortured souls beneath and that they pray to Christ to find peace in the awful world they live in. ”

The second verse, the mask is replaced. Some of them will die with their mask on and never realizing the truth or some will wake up without the mask and reveal the truth that it is wrong. Dunbar uses the word “mouth” as a verb, which intensifies our expressive genuine facial features that never lies. ” The debt that the black community is paying dearly by wearing the mask everyday for the cunning white race with “myriad subtleties”, the black race that wants to speak out and be heard. The words “world dream otherwise,” says that the otherwise will turn their head the other way and think differently. The masks when worn is always smiling but underneath are the torn and broken heart of one’s soul and “this debt we pay to human guile. In life, the mask is the concealment of those features that reveal tears that give quality to a smile. In the last three lines of the second verse emphasis their hurt when they are not around the white race and how they are trapped under the mask.

In Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem, he links it to the black race and uses extended metaphor to have a penetrating insight to the reality of the frowned upon race in America, that struggles for equality and peace within a racial society. Which did whites that treated blacks with disgust own.

Common topics in this essay:
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Approximate Word count = 623
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)

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