Masks and Mirrors
How much of ourselves do we really show to the world?
In this episode of A Voice Like This, three poets explore the distance between the face others see and the life being lived beneath it.
In “We Wear the Mask”, Paul Laurence Dunbar writes of the smiling face worn to conceal suffering, in words shaped by the particular experience of Black Americans living in a society marked by racism.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “Solitude” considers a world eager to share our happiness, but far less willing to accompany us in sorrow.
And in “I Look into My Glass”, Thomas Hardy turns from the faces we show others to the one we see ourselves, confronting the unsettling distance between an ageing reflection and a heart that has refused to grow old with it.
Masks do not always deceive. Sometimes they protect. And the face before us is never quite the whole story.
Poems featured:
We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Solitude by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
I Look into My Glass by Thomas Hardy
A Voice Like This brings poetry off the page and into the spoken word, with a new episode each week.