ipl-logo

Wear Masks: A Poem's Hidden Meaning

477 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: A little learning poem analysis

In the modern American poems We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Glass Ceiling by T.R Hummer, both poems has a distinctive, strong message that can baffle you if you do not read through thoroughly, the poems have hidden meaning that can confuse one. In Dunbar's poem he declares in a very elastic controversial way that we wear masks that hide our true feelings. In Hummer's poem he talks about his grandmother, which in reality is his mother and how wonderful she was he talks about her like he is happy, but yet he hides inside how hurt he feels that she passed away. These both poems show great similarities and differences. In the poem We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurance Dunbar, says in another language how wearing a mask hides your feelings and the way people see you, the poem has a powerful message. He focuses …show more content…

He shows a twist of emotions , and lacks to show identity. In the poem he says"...True i said "my grandmother" Because if i would have said my mother ypu wouldn't believe a word of it, since a mother should be leading,.." This means that through evry harsh emotion he makes lit of the situation by hiding the pain and hurtness and replacing it with joy, yet he makes you wonder of who the identity he truly is talking about. In the poems We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Glass Ceiling by T.R Hummer both have a significant amount of similarities and difference, although there is more similarities between them both.The similarities between both poes is that they both mask their central feelings, they express themselves but they dont want people to know how they really are inside. They wish to keep their feelings anonymous, so they always look happy. The main difference between the two is that one truly shows what they are say and mean what they say but the other poem twists what he says around as if he doesn't know what to

Show More
Related
725 Words | 3 Pages

Some people in high school are pretending to be at a big masquerade party. They wear masks pretending to be someone different from who they really are, and convince the people around them to see there mask as their true self. Many of the teenagers in the book Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes wore masks to hide who they really were. The students revealed their true identities and how they felt by writing and performing poetry on Open Mike Fridays in their English class. The main character, Tyrone Bittings, is a judgmental, confident, observant teen that reveals who he truly is through learning and listening to poetry.

Read More
217 Words | 1 Pages

“Masks” by Shel Silverstein is a deceptively simple poem. The poem has a rhyme scheme of ABCBDDED, and has a regular rhythm. The lines alternate rhythms, the first line is hard/soft/hard/soft, and the second is soft/hard/soft/hard. This alternating pattern continues throughout the poem. Though the reader might expect “Masks” to have a regular rhyme in addition to the rhythm, the rhyme scheme is not as consistent.

Read More
944 Words | 4 Pages

In Souls of Black Folk, one of the first analogies made was considering the “veil”. When I first read about the veil, it was confusing to consider what it meant and how it related to the community. However, upon further reading and consideration, the veil is the most accurate description of what was going on racially and socially then and now. Specifically, when he stated that behind the veil, one can see in and out but from outside the veil, you cannot see in, it was accurate because the white Americans of the time were trying to explain something they could not see into. This was impactful now as well due to the fact other want to claim that racism and oppression does not exist but yet have never experienced it.

Read More
409 Words | 2 Pages

The Veil is the answer to this question, “I was different from the others or like mayhap in heart and life and longing but shut out from there world by a vast veil.(Dubois,1903,pp.164). In this time there was no need for pondering racial injustices for the whiteman because they saw the world of the blackman as conflicting and consequently separate

Read More
245 Words | 1 Pages

American Realist People Often Get Treated Unfairly Authors use literary devices throughout their stories to get their ideas and points across. Authors such as Bret Harte, who wrote “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” and Paul Dunbar, who wrote “We Wear the Mask” use literary devices throughout their stories or poems. Bret Harte and Paul Dunbar are trying to gain their readers’ attention to get across their point of people getting treated unfairly. In the story about “The Outcasts Of Poker Flat” by Bret Harte the people got treated unfairly.

Read More
802 Words | 4 Pages

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

Read More
1218 Words | 5 Pages

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.

Read More
914 Words | 4 Pages

Masks hide the truth and obscure the facts. They form a barrier between what is real and what is an illusion. Yet, during from the moment blacks were brought to this continent in chains, to the moment they were granted civil rights in the 1960’s, masks were a method of survival. Another way of life for African Americans was the practice of signifying. Signifying is mostly seen in the black literary tradition as a means for African Americans to take back power from the white through misinformation and deception.

Read More
696 Words | 3 Pages

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

Read More
940 Words | 4 Pages

Another portion of the text that is worth analyzing is whether or not the poet is a real person or a generalization about all or most poets. All of the lines in the poem use general text and never label a specific person. What’s interesting about the text is that without the title it would be nearly impossible to distinguish whether or not the person the poem is about is a poet or not. The way the text allows the reader to find a figurative meaning to the poem is by being vague enough and

Read More
438 Words | 2 Pages

This poem dramatizes the struggles and fear that a hostage faced when in captivity. The poem titled “Captivity” by Louise Erdrich, is about a woman reflecting on her times when she was held captive and the anxiety that she felt. While she eventually is rescued, the speaker notes that her time spent as a hostage took a toll on her life as she no longer finds purpose and does not know what to do with her life. The poem is about how fear and terror changed the mindset of this captive.

Read More
1269 Words | 6 Pages

We all have felt worthless at one time or another as if we just faded into ethereal would have no affect on anyone. But what about being so undervalued in society that you have no personality to the outside world, one where any action is justified as you are nothing more than a triangle among a symphony. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man highlights the black struggle of mental illness as the unnamed narrator struggles with his loss of identity and constant struggle just to stay sane in his everyday world, and from the PTSD vets to the crazy man he encounters in New York, Ellison makes his character disdain in the eyes of society. Within the book Ellison tells the reader the struggle of how black patients were treated as lab rats, being unfairly

Read More
1924 Words | 8 Pages

DuBois wants to communicate the metaphor of the veil, which is worn by all African Americans because their view of the world and potential opportunities are so different than that of white people. Although DuBois uses both double consciousness and the veil as two separate concepts, their meanings deeply intertwine. He sees the veil as a gift of sorts to African Americans because it provides them with a second sight, which could potentially be a blessing and a curse. Double consciousness makes it hard for African Americans to establish their identity, which was made harder by the negative white American view of

Read More
681 Words | 3 Pages

The poem I chose to analyze is We Wear the Mask, written by Paul Lawrence Dunbar in 1896. Its theme is about hiding our true feelings and emotions, and lying about who we are. When looking at Dunbar’s life history, and the political context at the time, we understand that he efficiently uses this theme in order to talk about how black people have to hide how they feel about their social status and the treatment they receive from white people. He conveys the theme to the audience thanks to a clever word choice. Indeed, he talks about “grin” and “smile”, using facial expressions as a description of the mask (Dunbar, lines 1 & 4).

Read More
323 Words | 2 Pages

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

Read More

More about Wear Masks: A Poem's Hidden Meaning

Related Topics

Open Document