Comparing 'Alone And They Wear The Mask' By Paul Laurence Dunbar

Towards the beginning of this semester we began reading a lot of interesting poems and short articles of such. There were a couple of poems that actually hit me, that actually got my attention and made me wonder if it was true or even made me feel a connection to the writer. There is a quote by E. L. Doctorow that says “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained up.” (E. L. Doctorow). All the poems that I have read within the past 5 weeks only two poems made me have some type of feelings towards what the author is trying to portray. These two poems are called: “Alone –by Edgar Allen Poe,” and “We Wear The Mask – by Paul Laurence Dunbar.” I believe that every author who writes a piece whether it is an article, a poem, or a story should have some sort of feeling behind these piece. The reason why I believe that there should be a meaning to every piece an …show more content…
From the title itself “We Wear The Mask” we can simply put to context that there has to be some sort of meaning behind the title. That meaning is that we always tend to hide our inner emotions, in a line Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote he says: “With torn and bleeding hearts we smile” (Paul Laurence Dunbar, Line 4). Reading this line I came to understand that we smile because we want to hide what is deeply hurting us. I remember reading a poem in school called “Awoken By You – by greengueen” and in this poem you can connect to it deeply. This poem is mainly about how someone can bring you happiness, that brings you great emotions and makes you feel like your somebody and not alone. Greenqueen expresses these feeligns within the first two lines, she writes: “Loneliness rippled by your presence.” (Greenqueen, Lines 1-2). With this quote you can already sense great emotions and feelings that the author is trying to