Summary

“We Wear the Mask” opens with the speakers describing the experience of “[wearing] the mask that grins in lies” (1). The speakers’ putting on a mask is not completely voluntary. They adorn it as a “debt we pay to human guile” (3). In fact, rather than the speakers reveling in the supposed deceptiveness of wearing a mask, underneath hides “torn and bleeding hearts” and “myriad subtleties” (4-5).

The speakers further develop the idea of wearing a mask in the second stanza. With a rhetorical question – “Why should the world be over-wise, / In counting all our tears and sights?” – the speakers suggest that wearing a mask is not without personal, protective benefit. A mask allows the speakers to shield their vulnerability from what is often a cruel, unmerciful world. The speaker declares in conclusion, “Nay, let them only see us, while / We wear the mask” (8-9).

In...