We Wear The Mask By Paul Laurence Dunbar Essay

Paul Laurence Dunbar is a poet that was an African-American poet who was born in 1872. His parents were both freed slaves from Kentucky, he wrote stories about their plantation life. At the young age of fourteen he had one of his first poems published in the Dayton Herald. Dunbar did not attend college and took a job as an elevator operator. He self published his first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy in 1893. He sold copies to people riding in his elevator to help pay for publishing costs. In 1895 his poems started appearing in many newspapers and magazines. Later that year he published his second book of poetry, Majors and Minors. The majors were the poems that he wrote in standard English and the minors were written in dialect. His first professionally published volume was titled Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896). This contained some of his most famous poetry.

In the next four years he would release more work. In 1899 he published a short story collection titled Folks from Dixie, a novel, The Uncalled, and another …show more content…
This poem is one of my favorite poems that I have read. The poem is about how humans typically keep their true feelings bottled up inside of them and feel how people want them to feel. Wearing the mask is deceiving to others because we don’t allow them to see how we truly feel. In the opening lines Dunbar writes, "We wear the mask that grins and lies,/ It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,"(1-2). By hiding our cheeks we do not let people see if we are frowning or smiling. The mask that grins and lies would be what we allow people to see, which is use smiling and pretending that everything is alright. A couple lines later Dunbar says, "With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,"(4). This line is describing the pain and suffering that we are hiding behind our masks. While not all people hide the same amount of pain everyone has something that they are keeping hidden behind their metaphorical