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Though the speaker of “We Wear the Mask” emphasizes the suffering and despair of their community, the poem ultimately has a resistant and dignified tone that underscores community pride. The reader may detect the poem’s tone of resistance from the very beginning. In the opening stanza, for instance, the speaker insists on their community’s capacity to evade the outside world’s penetrating gaze (lines 1–5):

     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.

Pay particular attention to the first and last lines of the stanza. In each, the speaker foregrounds the community’s ability to present a smiling demeanor to an otherwise threatening world. The community’s deceptive capacity is particularly evident in the pairing of “lies” and “subtleties”—a quietly jarring slant rhyme that resists the poem’s otherwise rigid rhyme scheme. Despite this subtle break from exact rhyme, the careful reader will observe that the rest of the opening stanza features exact rhymes and a perfectly regular metrical scheme. This fidelity to traditional meter and rhyme can itself be interpreted as a kind of mask, which the speaker uses to maintain a show of dignity. In this sense, Dunbar’s choice of a rigid poetic form reflects the speaker’s overall emphasis on the mask as a tool for maintaining a sense of pride.

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