We Wear the Mask Essay -- Literature

capital of Minnesota Laurence Dunbars 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 young 19th century, around the time of slavery. As the poem progresses, Dunbar reveals the faade of the mask, portrayed in the third stanza where the speaker states, But let the dream otherwise (13). The unreal character of the mask has played a significant mapping 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, implication that their sadness is related to them deceiving others. Unlike his other poems, with its prevalent use of threatening dialect, Dunbars We Wear the Mask acts as an apologia (or justification) for the minstrel flavour of some of his dialect poems (Desmet, Hart and Miller 466). Through the utilization of iambic tetrameter, end rhyme, sound devices and figurat ive language, the speaker expresses the hidden pain and scummy African Americans possessed, as they were tortured souls behind their masks (10). The poems meter, iambic tetrameter, stands for the speakers heartfelt attitude regarding the sorrow that blacks kept extraneous from whites, and in some cases, themselves. In the first stanza, the speaker proclaims that with torn and eject hearts we smile, / And oral fissure with myriad subtleties (4-5). During the time Dunbar published We Wear the Mask, blacks were inured with no dignity and were discriminated against on a constant basis. They felt they could non 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 soulfulness in society. Although 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 incur his or her character. Works CitedDunbar, Paul Laurence. We Wear the Mask. Prentice Hall books 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 fall by the wayside Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 9 February 2012. Web. 12 February 2012.