Self-Concealment and Anonymity

From even the first lines, Dunbar’s poem emphasizes that its main focus is the concealment of one’s interiority – “We wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes” (1-2). One of the poem’s main concerns related to the theme of hiding one’s inner life is how much choice the mask wearer has in that process of hiding. On the one hand, the concealment is a “debt,” suggesting that it is necessitated by the discriminatory of system of economics underpinned by the law. On the other hand, the speakers in the second stanza claim the mask for themselves as a protective shield they put on by choice to prevent the debt-collecting world from tearing into the vulnerabilities of their true inner lives, their “tears and sighs” (7). Yet while the stanza seemingly ends on the bold...