We Wear the Mask

"We Wear the Mask" is an 1895 poem in the rondeau form by Paul Laurence Dunbar. It is generally considered one of his most famous works and has been cited by several scholars as his best poem. The poem appeared in Dunbar's second volume of poetry.

Background

Dunbar in 1897

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906) was an American poet. Born to formerly enslaved people, he became one of the most prominent African-American poets of his time in the 1890s.[1] "We Wear the Mask" was first published in Dunbar's 1895 Majors and Minors, which was his second volume of poems.[2]

Text

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
       We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
       We wear the mask!

Reception

The poem, a rondeau,[3] has been cited as one of Dunbar's most famous poems.[4]

In her introduction to The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the literary critic Joanne Braxton deemed "We Wear the Mask" one of Dunbar's most famous works and noted that it has been "read and reread by critics".[5] The poem is written from a "we" point of view, which represents the "black folk collective", according to Braxton.[5] Braxton considers "We Wear the Mask" to be a protest poem which showed "strong racial pride".[6] Across the three stanzas, the world is unaware of the struggle of black people. Martin and Hudson write that "Dunbar was persuaded that the world was an affair of masks, that he could reveal himself only by the way he concealed himself, that the truths of his being were masked" and conclude that similar sentiments were later expressed by poets such as Robert Frost and W. B. Yeats,[7] as well as civil rights activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois in his work The Souls of Black Folk.[8]

Peter Revell, Dunbar's biographer, described "We Wear the Mask" as "arguably the finest poem Dunbar produced" and drew parallels to the later Peau Noire Masques Blancs by Frantz Fanon. Dunbar was perhaps best known for writing poems in "African-American dialect", but abandoned that style in this poem.[9] The mask may refer to African Americans being forced to conform to stereotypes forced upon them by white society, such as Dunbar's dialect poems,[10] which he at times felt confined to writing.[11] Dunbar is saying that African Americans were only seen for their "mask", or through the mold that white society forced them to fill. Dunbar is expressing the idea of a "double consciousness", which civil rights activists would later adopt. The metaphor of a mask also says that African Americans are "preeminently commodities" and "marginally" citizens, according to the scholar Willie J. Harrell Jr.[12] The scholar Daniel P. Black considered "We Wear the Mask" Dunbar's magnum opus but described it as a risk that "could have cost him his life, and indeed ... undoubtedly would have—had nineteenth-century readers comprehended fully the poem's multiple meanings."[13]

The poem was included as a summary to The Electric Playground's review of King's Quest: Mask of Eternity.[14]

Citations

1. "Paul Laurence Dunbar". Poetry Foundation. 2021-02-13. Retrieved 2021-02-14.
2. Revell 1979, p. 57.
3. Greene, Roland; Cushman, Stephen (2016-07-26). The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms: Third Edition. Princeton University Press. p. 307. ISBN 978-0-691-17043-5.
4. Graham & Ward 2011, p. 206.
5. Dunbar 1993, p. xxii.
6. Dunbar 1993, p. xvii.
7. Dunbar 1993, p. xxiii.
8. Braxton & Ramey 2015.
9. Revell 1979, p. 71.
10. Graham & Ward 2011, p. 207.
11. Candela 1976.
12. Harrell 2010, p. xi.
13. Black 2005, p. 387.
14. Grant, Jules (1999-01-12). "King's Quest: The Mask of Eternity [sic] (Summary)". The Electric Playground. Greedy Productions Ltd. Archived from the original on 2002-11-01. Retrieved 2023-07-09.

References

• Graham, Maryemma; Ward, Jerry W. Jr. (2011-02-03). The Cambridge History of African American Literature. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521872171. ISBN 978-0-521-87217-1.
• Harrell, Willie J. Jr. (2010). We Wear the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Politics of Representative Reality. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. ISBN 978-1-61277-507-4. OCLC 794698858.
• Dunbar, Paul Laurence (1993). The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. University of Virginia Press. ISBN 978-0-8139-1438-1.
• Revell, Peter (1979). Paul Laurence Dunbar. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-7213-8. OCLC 4549910.
• Candela, Gregory L. (1976). "We Wear the Mask: Irony in Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods". American Literature. 48 (1): 60–72. doi:10.2307/2925314. ISSN 0002-9831. JSTOR 2925314.
• Braxton, Joanne; Ramey, Lauri (2015-10-14), Richardson, Mark (ed.), "Paul Laurence Dunbar", The Cambridge Companion to American Poets (1 ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp. 136–143, doi:10.1017/cco9781316403532.011, ISBN 978-1-316-40353-2, retrieved 2021-03-01
• Black, Daniel P. (2005). "Literary Subterfuge: Early African American Writing and the Trope of the Mask". CLA Journal. 48 (4): 387–403. ISSN 0007-8549. JSTOR 44325281.

External links

• Works related to We Wear the Mask at Wikisource
• The Poetry Foundation