"We Wear the Mask" by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

The most poignant part of this poem is the title. We mask ourselves off from the world by changing our masks according do our day to day agenda. We masks ourselves for privacy because our own sense of self-hood relies on this mask. The speaker captures a "universal persona" through her "imaginative power." "We wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes- this debt we pay to human guile..."