TITLE: Minstrel Man
AUTHOR: Langston Hughes
STYLE: Comparative critic
Speaker: someone who confesses their true inner and outer feelings
Occasion: a confession to a peer or to one self (some sort of reflection as well)
Audience: anyone who can relate to feeling held back or who is misunderstood
Purpose: to confess and reveal the truth about how one’s feeling
Subject: having a façade and living life hidden and unrealistically
TONE: hopeful, dry, sorrowful
While this poem is extremely short and simple, it carries great significance. The use of questions followed by an answer with simple language reiterates the emotions behind the confession. Like the poem, “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, both authors talk about feeling hidden behind how they truly feel. Dunbar uses hiding behind a mask to convey feeling one way however reacting oppositely, while Hughes reveal by stating the obvious and posing questions while answering with the truth. Both authors discuss the struggle behind showing their true feelings in public and how they hide behind a façade of artificiality only to later be overwhelmed with uncontrollable emotions. However, one uses a symbol of a “mask” while the other use compares his self to a “minstrel man”. These two poems touch on similar issues which when read back to back you would think they were confessing to one another or at least they could join in a conversation of some sort.
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