Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, May 24th,

2003. Today's poem is by an American poet named Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Dunbar lived from 1872 to

1906, and was a poet, novelist, and a short story writer, whose parents had been enslaved in Kentucky before the Civil War.

And he became one of the first African-American writers

to create for himself any kind of reputation as a writer,

especially an international reputation as a poet.

The poem that I'm going to read today was from an 1895 volume of poetry,

Dunbar's second volume of poetry,

and it's called We Wear the Mask. It goes like this.

We wear the mask that grins and lies. It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.

This debt we paid a human guile. With torn and bleeding

hearts we smile and mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be overwise

in counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us while we wear the mask.

We smile, but, oh, 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 mile. But let the world dream otherwise.

We wear the mask.

This poem is a often anthologized poem, one of a couple of Dunbar's that are often

anthologized.

And it's a shame that he only lived to be 34, 35 years old because he would have

produced an incredible array of poetry, I think, that would make him one of the greatest of

American poets. And even with only a couple of collections, he's still there. This is one of those poems that talks about the idea of double consciousness,

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