Read by Shane Morris
Full poem
We wear the mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar
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!
"We Wear the Mask" is an 1895 poem 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.
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906) was an American poet. Born to freed slaves, he became one of the most prominent African-American poets of his time in the 1890s.
"We Wear the Mask" was first published in Dunbar's 1895 Majors and Minors, which was his second volume of poems.
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, which he at times felt confined to writing.
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.
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