Dunbar and the Poetics of the Mask

Paul Laurence Dunbar, the son of formerly enslaved parents and among the first African American poets to achieve wide national recognition, wrote both in standard literary English and in dialect verse. "We Wear the Mask" (1895) uses a controlled, songlike form with a returning refrain to describe a performed cheerfulness concealing real pain: "We wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes." The mask functions as an extended metaphor sustained across the whole poem -- a required social performance covering something the poem insists is genuinely painful underneath, not an exaggeration.

Written during the post-Reconstruction era of hardening racial segregation and violence, the poem's "we" carries real, specific historical weight even as its central image speaks to something more universal: hidden suffering behind a performed smile. Its most striking line is an authentic, direct cry of both faith and anguish: "We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries / To thee from tortured souls arise." The poem's refrain, "We wear the mask," opens the poem and returns to close it, formally trapping the whole poem inside the very performance it describes -- form and content reinforcing each other exactly, a technique this year has now traced from Poe's unity of effect through Dickinson's meter to Dunbar's refrain.