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Dunbar's 'We Wear The Mask'

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Recommended: We wear the mask by Paurl Laurence Dunbar analysis

In We Wear the Mask, the author’s rhetorical purpose is to teach the reader why people hide behind their emotions. Dunbar states in the poem that “We wear the mask”, but what mask? What are ‘we’ hiding from? Dunbar explains that we (everyone) are hiding our feelings about one another. He is trying to make the reader realize what people are hiding from everyone else. To show this, Dunbar uses many different rhetorical patterns throughout his poem. While reading the poem, “We wear the mask” is said multiple times. It is said 3 times and takes up about 20% of the poem. The first and ending line is this statement. It also ends the middle stanza. This pattern is called Dunbar used this pattern to get his point across. His point is to prove that at the beginning and in the end, everyone still …show more content…

The purpose of this pattern is for the rhyming to not be perfect. It shows that the world is not perfect and that people wearing the mask always try to be perfect. Dunbar wants people wearing the mask to realize that they don't have to be perfect all of the time. People hide their emotions to make them appear perfect, but Dunbar is trying to undo that. Dunbar uses words like torture, tears, lies, and sighs to show the hate in the world. These are called pain words. Since the world is not perfect, there is hate in the world and lots of pain. People will never get rid of it because it isn't possible. Dunbar relates this to his purpose by hiding the emotions with the hurtful words. The poem has many happy words. Happy words like smile and heart. People like to smile and everyone has a heart. People love laughing and that's what the world needs. The world needs laughter to balance out the anger. There is too much evil and hate in the world, but smiling and laughing makes the world seem better. Dunbar uses this happiness to relate to the emotions we hide behind our

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Since the poem is a Blues, the phonological structure of the text is of great importance and at the same time it cannot be expected to find many regularities. This assumption can be validated at first glance: There is no veritable rhyme scheme. On the other hand, there two dysillabic internal rhymes {\tql}bunch, hunch{\tqr} (l.1) and {\tql}sputter, gutter{\tqr} (l.2-3). Still the author uses a lot of other sound patterns as for example Alliteration, Consonance, Assonance and Onomatopoeia. For each only one or two examples are given due to their high occurrence.

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There are several components necessary to make a poem both understandable and engaging. William Dickey’s short poem, or chant as he calls it, The Lumbar Executive, possesses two of these components, persona, who is speaking in the poem, and repetition and rhythm, the repeat of words or lines and how it helps with the flow of the poem. William Dickey titled his poem, The Lumbar Executive, already telling the reader that the poem is in the point of view of some sort of big boss, to be more exact a lumbar executive. The typical, somewhat stereotypical, characteristics of a man in charge is seen throughout the poem. Within the first line of what Dickey calls a chant, the unnamed lumbar executive is giving orders, “The sacred direction: down.

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“We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes-.” This quote is from the poem, “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar which is a poem about the struggle that Paul Laurence Dunbar’s family went through during their lives being enslaved. This quote represents the role that a mask can play in covering up true self. By wearing a mask, a person is covering up their unique features. Also, they are not letting anyone get to know them as well as hiding their persona from the public.

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Considered very significant to numerous people, happiness and external appearances plays a part in themes of various works. Therefore, these themes of people’s happiness and outward looks are usually ones that many people want to experience. Reading works with these themes can allow the reader to view the subject within the author’s point of view. Poems with these themes lets the readers understand the topic through new eyes, and they may even inspire the reader think about what is truly valuable in life. Two poems that share the themes of happiness and external appearances are Marge Percy’s “Barbie Doll” and Edwin Robinson’s “Richard Cory”.

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As I read, Paul L. Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” I was interested in how he described what a mask represents. It is true that a mask was used to hide a person’s pain, emotion, or mood before the day known as Halloween developed. I love how Paul refers the use of the masks as a black or white person’s escape from other peoples’ worried faces. No one can ever understand what someone else is going through. People can never truly speak their truth or let out their suffering.

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Such personification mirrors Dunbar’s use of figurative language, which relates the poems in more ways than one. Dunbar touches on human features such as cheeks and eyes in his poem but also uses a spiritual element to advance his point of view. Furthermore, “We Wear the Mask” was written in 1896; a period in American history that was post-slavery but still had widespread discrimination. The spiritual connotation within Dunbar’s poem can allude to African American churches and/or the hymns slaves sung on plantations. Nevertheless, the struggle of African Americans is a symbol of both presented

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In Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” the speaker wears a mask to hide his internal suffering because he does not want the rest of the world to think he is weak. This poem relates the prejudice black people face against white people. The speaker starts the poem with the lines, “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” (1). Here he describes the kind of “masks” that he wears.

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He used this motif of wearing a mask a great deal in his novel, and it leads us to believe that, everyone wears a mask, even society. The idea shown in this poem is also shown through the narrator’s introduction into the novel. For example, in the prologue, Ellison wrote, “I am an invisible man…I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (3). This shows how the narrator represents the norms of society in that people are forced into wearing masks in order to even be seen in other people’s eyes. The narrator begins, in literal terms, as one of those people who haven’t realized that being themselves is just not enough.

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The oldest found mask is from 7000 BC, and experts believe it was used for rituals and ceremonies. Masks have an important cultural context in history, and as the use of masks has progressed, humans have adopted masks into other forms of entertainment and festivities. In present times, with better understanding of human psychology, society has come to understand that people wear emotional “masks” as well. Masks have a somewhat important context in both Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask”. Both works describe masks as a way to hide one’s true self from everyone; Dunbar, however, depicts masks as an emotional barrier to cover up one’s true emotions or feelings, while Golding uses masks as a physical object to hide behind.

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He utilizes the mask when he says that “I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford…” (Fitzgerald ##). He wants everyone including Nick Carraway, the narrator, to know that he is a valuable and worthy person. However, it backfires when Nick Carraway says “I knew why

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It is, obviously, a symbolic one, that is meant to hide the suffering of people. It hides everything, “our cheeks and […] our eyes”, and “the eyes [being] the mirror of the soul”, the mask hides the inner you. (Dunbar, l. 2) (Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra). But, in addition to the hiding, there’s also the lie about the emotion. Indeed, the mask isn’t only meant to hide the emotions, but also to create new ones on the surface, as we can see when the author said “We wear the mask that […] lies” (Dunbar, l. 1).

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In Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy” there is end rhyme present but no real rhyme scheme. Those are some of the rhythmic elements Dunbar uses in his writing. Dunbar writes his poems on very serious matters, such as life and dreams and identity. In his poem “We Wear the Mask” Dunbar writes about people wearing masks but the true meaning of the poem is how people will try to hide their identity to look like a better more perfect person. In his poem “Life” dunbar writes about how life is not always good and at t8imes life seems to be really bad.

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In line 3 of the poem its states " a pint of joy and a peck of trouble". This is an example of figurative language that is used to explain that life has its happy moments, but it also comes with the trouble and hardships as well. This line supports my claim of Dunbar using figurative language to convey the meaning of life because this phrase means that life does indeed have its up and downs and with life comes allot of good, but also allot of problems. By stating this he is giving us an outlook on what we have to expect while alive and into this society. Although it seems like life goes as its planned, there is always the good that can result from all the troubles you have already overcome.

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The mask might be to hide who we are to those that should not know our true selves. We can see masks in everything, from actors in moves to authors of books to writers of poetry. These masks can take many forms as we see but this also extends to the characters in the poems and the poems themselves. What this means is that the writers of early African-American poetry had to hide their true selves, their true feelings, in order to get their poetry published. Early poetry,

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The main theme of the poem is centered on the masks that we wear in society, but the poem digs deeper than the simple statement, ‘we all wear masks’. Teasdale presents the insight that when we are walking on the sidewalk, surrounded by the chaos of the streets, we delve into our own thoughts and the mask lifts. Because we are among strangers rather than coworkers, family, or peers, we do

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