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What Does We Wear The Mask Mean

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Poetry has always been used to express one’s emotions and thoughts about the world. Emotions and desperation are the main vocal points of the poem, “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The poem, “We Wear the Mask” by Dunbar was written in the 19th century during a time when many African Americans were oppressed in the United States due to segregation laws but this did not halt Dunbar from gaining recognition from the poem while shedding light on the struggles of African Americans’ emotions. In, “We Wear the Mask” Paul Dunbar uses repetition, punctuation, rhyming scheme, enjambed lines, and end-stopped lines to indicate that people repress their emotions deep down, never expressing them leading them to crack under the pressure of society. …show more content…

Furthermore, enjambed lines are shown in the poem in the lines, “We sing, but oh the clay is vile, Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise” (Lines 12-14). In these lines in the poem enjambed lines are employed to illustrate how the speaker is forced to suppress their emotions in this world that they are disgusted by because one can only express their emotions that are eating them from the inside out in their dreams rather than in reality. The speaker is unable to forgive the world they live in for taking something so human from them while making them bottle the emotions they have on the inside which forces them to crack under the strain of them finally becoming consumed by their own feelings from the inside out. Lastly, end-stopped lines are presented throughout the poem to enhance the theme in the lines, “We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries, To thee from tortured souls arise.” (Lines 10-11). In this quote, end-stopped lines are employed to demonstrate how the speaker has grown more suffocated by their emotions appearing happy on the outside but behind their mask, they are suffering as they plea for mercy from God from the depth of their tortured soul. They claim that God hears the cries of both themselves and the general population as the result of a soul that has been too severely damaged by the ever-more-repressed emotions that have finally begun to seep out killing them

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Enjambment is used in Billy Collins’ poem, “The Names”, to create a flowing sound that mimics the flowing of the water droplets as they “fell through the dark” (Collins 7). While some authors’ style is short lines, this device nevertheless allows the writer to continue his sentence throughout multiple lines, rather than creating limitations for his thoughts at line breaks. Enjambment can help to produce a stronger rhythm in the poem, in addition to reinforcing the ideas articulated by the author; it also adds to the weight of the poem in that it emphasizes the continuity of the feelings evoked by the words. Although this section of the poem is centered on water and how it relates to the names of the dead from the tragedy that was 9/11, the

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This demonstrates how Maus portrays the theme because it says that Valdek and Anja stayed strong throughout the Holocaust. We Wear The Mask portrays this theme because it is a sad but strong poem. For example, in stanza 1, line 4 states, “With torn and bleeding hearts we smile”. This demonstrates how we wear masks portraying the theme because it shows even with sad and broken hearts they stood strong. However, Maus and I wear masks that use vastly different structural elements to portray this

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851 Words | 4 Pages

“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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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

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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.

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685 Words | 3 Pages

In the poem it says, “we wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.” This shows that people hide themselves so people can’t see who they truly are and so they can fit in with non-black people. Black people we’re probably scared that white people will judge them and do something bad to them for not being the same color as them. They were afraid of being judged, to being mistreated by them. This is why they decided to hide their true

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To begin, I chose the poem “We Wear Mask '' written by Paul Laurence Dunbar to represent how collaboration and community bring out the best in people. First The poem shows how the Black community tries to wear mask because they scared to show their identity. They were scared to show them there true self because they knew the white community wouldn’t respect them because of there color. Not only that they knew that the white community didn’t respect them for who they are

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1000 Words | 4 Pages

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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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.

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1280 Words | 6 Pages

The mask is thus a metaphor for social performance by African- American’s to avoid the consequences associated with telling the truth about their experiences with racial injustice and their feelings about it. The mask wearer is portrayed as having to pretend they are content when they had no reason to be so in the existing social context and this emphasizes the significance of the mask as a tool of survival Dunbar’s piece begins with: “We wear the mask that grins and lies / it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,”- this is quickly an indicator that this mask is a device used by its

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1009 Words | 5 Pages

Humans tend to put on outward attitudes in various situations. Whether it results from their insecurities or their responsibilities of protecting somebody, people mask their true emotions and feelings. In the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, many of the characters hide their true feelings and change their personalities in order to appear strong and in order to conform to society. However, in the poem, “We Wear the Mask,” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the narrator and his people, the African Americans, suffer tragedies, such as discrimination and racial hate. Despite this, the people are coerced to keep a positive outward demeanor in order to appear strong and to not allow others to take advantage of them.

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Commission Junction is an online advertising company. It is owned by ValueClick. It operates in the affiliate marketing business. It is the largest affiliate network in North America. It enriches almost 62% of the top 500 affiliate marketing programs of world retailers.

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The idea of a veil or a mask is described throughout many black writers, because it is such a shared and common feeling among them. In Paul Dunbar's poem “We Wear the Masks” he explains how black people wear masks that hides their true feeling “We wear the mask that grins and lies,... With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And a mouth with myriad subtleties... We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries. To thee from tortured souls arise.”

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345 Words | 2 Pages

I feel like everyone has had to wear a mask at some point in their life. People are always so afraid of other people’s opinion and what they’ll think. It is evident in the poem, that at that time blacks were still afraid of what other people would do if they really said how they felt. They would put on this act that made them seem happy to be free, but behind that they would still be upset about all the rights they still didn’t possess, line one “We wear the mask that grins and lies”. African-Americans realized how hard it would be for them to gain all that everyone else had, stated in line thirteen “Beneath our feet, and long the mile”, and were scared of that, too.

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869 Words | 4 Pages

An example of an enjambment from the text is, “There is/ no way to know how easy this/ white skin makes my life, this / life…” (Olds 26-29). The enjambments, although simple, give the poem a much more powerful meaning, by showing the harshness of the reality for blacks during this time period. They seem to reflect the thoughts and emotions of the poem and the author. It shows that she feels somewhat guilty, because of what she has in life because of her skin color, as opposed to what the boy has because of his skin color.

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