The Mask
Every minute of every day people wear a mask. A mask to hide thetrue identity of their feelings. The 1896 poem "We Wear the Mask",Paul Laurence Dunbar illustrates this theory. People wear mask formany different reasons but mostly to hide their true self from society. The message portrayed by Dunbar is that it is one's self right to wear a The first couplet clearly states how strongly Dunbar feels aboutthe mask that we wear. According to him the mask allows us to"grin[s] and lie[s]" while on the inside we are hiding how we truly feel. By hiding our cheeks and shading our eyes we jade reality. In thefollowing line Dunbar explains one of the ways we use our mask is tobe "guile". Guile means that we are deceitful to others in our dailyquest. The fourth line of the stanza explains that we may hurt deeplyon the inside but because we are wearing our mask we still smile. Sono matter how bad we do hurt, out of habit we feel obligated to puton a mask for everyone else. Dunbar ends the stanza by implying th
I believe he might feel this way because inhis personal life he may have had something to hide from the world. Perhaps we are not harming a soul by the mask wewear. At the same time he seems to besaying that we should wear our mask everyday and take it off for noone. The third and fourth line ofthe final stanza Dunbar says "We sing, but oh the clay is vile beneathour feet. Dunbar believes that we should not have to let the world know"all our tears and sighs". It is not always healthy to hideones true self and feelings, especially if they are painful. We are the clay and you[God] are the potter; we are thework of your hands". I also feelthat if you continually ware you mask you will soon lose touch of whoyou really are. I think that he alludes to Isaiah 64:8 in which itstates " . No one can ever be sure of the message that Dunbar istrying to relay to us. This poem goes deeper than just the words on the page. atnot only do we lie with our smiles but our mouth lies through the smilewith "myriad and subtle" words.
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