Claude McKay & Paul Dunbar

Rage simmers behind the masque of Dunbar's poetic formality. In McKay's poem, however, the indignation is obvious but the complex body part of the poem allows it to build to a logical, frightening, and stirring conclusion. that McKay by design uses the Shakespearean sonnet form and an imitation of Shakespearean diction to convert the struggles of his own people (the subject his readers easily identify) into a universal auspicate for people to defend themselves against a joint enemy who wants to wipe them place. Thus there is little about(predicate) McKay's poem that would allow an uninformed reader to determine the place, time, author's race, or audience of this poem because he uses the language of the oppressors to urge the oppress to fight against them.

Dunbar's poem is written in iambic tetrameter and contains genuinely few rowing of more than one syllable. The short words emphasize the regular rocking rung that resembles a children's rhyme. And for the first trinity lines of the poem the reader, while aware that something is being hidden, is not in full prepared for the fourth line where the shocking image of " separate and bleeding hearts" emerges. It emerges only to have its intensity rapidly suppressed as the line ends with "we smile," which rhymes almost childishly with "guile." But the line up depth of feeling is established by the stemma between the "torn and bleeding" and the "smile.

" The smile, a feature of the mask, hides the true feelings of the pe

The second stanza continues the regular rhythm but contemplates the sense of fatigue that comes from the intensity of feeling that peeks out from behind the masks in the first stanza. Here the rhyme outline of aabba seems about to continue but, as if the speaker was just similarly weary, the suggestion is made that just as the fury is hidden, the weariness should be kept out of sight as strong and it is almost a relief to "wear the mask." In the thirdly stanza, as if the previous line had been broken off, the word "smile" (which continues the rhyme scheme) hides in the first line behind the call on Christ to witness the combination of weariness and anger that is given physical form in the "vile" form and weary "feet" that tread through the world as cogent evidence of the feelings that are disguised by the mask.

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