We Wear the Mask Essay -- Literature

Paul Laurence Dunbars We Wear the Mask is a lyric verse 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 faade of the mask, portray in the third stanza where the loudspeaker system states, But let the dream otherwise (13). The unreal character of the mask has played a significant role all over the life of African Americans, whom pretend to put on a smile when they feel sad internally. This ocassion, according to Dunbar, is the debt we pay to human guile, meaning that their sadness is connect to them deceiving others. Unlike his other poems, with its prevalent use of black dialect, Dunbars We Wear the Mask acts as an apologia (or justification) for the minstrel quality of some of his dialect poems (Desmet, stag and Miller 466). Through the utilization of iambic tetrameter, end rhyme, sound devices and figurative language, the speaker expresses the hidden pain and suffering African Americans possessed, as they were tortured souls tush their masks (10). The poems meter, iambic tetrameter, stands for the speakers heart mat attitude regarding the sorrow that blacks kept away from whites, and in some cases, themselves. In the first stanza, the speaker proclaims that with torn and bleeding hearts we smile, / And utter with myriad subtleties (4-5). During the time Dunbar published We Wear the Mask, blacks were treated with no dignity and were discriminated against on a constant basis. They felt they could not do anything to stop the series of unfortunate events that were happening to them, such as beatings, lynches, and no sufficient way to earn income or educ... ...eding hearts and mouth . . . . myriad subtleties (4-5).Today, everyone is entitled to having equal opportunities in the US. Back in Dunbars time, on the other hand, slavery prohibited blacks from being an ordinary person in society. Al though they prayed heavily and persevered, they wore the mask for the time-being, in the hopes of living in a world where the color of ones skin would not determine his or her character. whole shebang CitedDunbar, Paul Laurence. We Wear the Mask. Prentice Hall Literature Portfolio. Ed. Christy Desmet, D. Alexis Hart, and Deborah Church Miller. Upper Saddle River, NJ Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2007. 466-67. Print. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 9 February 2012. Web. 12 February 2012.