Dunbar wrote “We Wear the Mask” as a rondeau (RON-DOE), which is a verse form that was first developed by singing troubadours in medieval France. Because the rondeau was used for music, it has a somewhat flexible form and can be modified to suit shorter or longer songs, though most rondeaux have between ten and fifteen lines in their lyrics. What defines the rondeau is thus not its length but its accommodation of two formal parameters. First, a rondeau includes a nonrhyming refrain that initially appears in the first half of the opening line, then reappears on its own at the end of the poem’s last two stanzas. Second, a rondeau uses only two end rhymes for the entire poem. Dunbar’s poem is a 15-line rondeau that carefully follows the traditional model and abides by both the parameters outline above. “We Wear the Mask” consists of three stanzas that feature the standard rondeau rhyme scheme: AABBA AABR AABBAR. Note that the R designates the refrain, which doesn’t fit into the overall rhyme scheme.

Although the poem’s main idea doesn’t develop a great deal from stanza to stanza, each stanza does express the speaker’s concern with self-protection and concealment in a slightly different way. In the first stanza, the speaker introduces the metaphor of wearing a mask to hide one’s true feelings. It’s clear that they belong to a larger community, and they indicate that some form of “human guile” (line 3) has led them to conceal their suffering and “wear the mask” of false contentment. The speaker reiterates the importance of the mask in the second stanza, but they do so by posing a rhetorical question about why they should let the outside world see behind the mask. Concluding that no good would come from self-revelation, the speaker reasserts the importance of concealment: “Nay, let them only see us, while / We wear the mask” (lines 8–9). In the third stanza, the speaker returns to their previous insistence on the suffering they experience in this life. Here, though, the speaker turns their figurative gaze heavenward to address Christ, as if praying for future salvation. In the meantime, though, the speaker and their companions will continue to “wear the mask” (line 15).