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Compare the use of figurative language in "Harlem" by Hughes and "We Wear the Mask" by Dunbar.
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Both "We Wear the Mask" by Dunbar and "Harlem" by Hughes use figurative language to explore the African American experience. Dunbar employs the metaphor of a "mask" to depict the facade black people must maintain to survive in a racist society, suggesting resignation to this necessity. In contrast, Hughes uses vivid imagery involving food, like "raisin" and "rotten meat," to convey the volatility and potential explosiveness of deferred dreams, leaving the outcome uncertain and ominous.
Both Dunbar and Hughes are writing about the common theme of blackness in America and the black experience. They are, however, writing at different points in the struggle toward equality, and this is reflected in the language they use, particularly their figurative language.
The central image in Dunbar's poem is, as the title would indicate, the "mask." This mask, Dunbar says, "grins and lies": it represents the face black people are forced to present to white society in order to survive in a world which does not want to acknowledge their suffering. It is very clear that the wearers of the mask are filled with anguish beneath it —the imagery in the final section of the poem is redolent of slavery and forced marches, as the "clay" and the "long . . . mile" cause suffering. Ultimately, however, there is little suggestion in Dunbar's poem that there is any alternative...
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to the wearing of the mask: he concludes by saying, "let the world dream otherwise." The mask covers the parts of the black experience white people do not want to see, but it also enables black people to survive because it helps them pretend that things are bearable.
In Hughes's poem, the situation feels altogether more volatile. Hughes asks what happens to a "dream deferred"—seemingly a reference to the American dream of equality for all. He chooses figurative language relating to food, suggesting that the dream has been left long enough that it may soon go bad, "dry" like a "raisin in the sun," or "stink like rotten meat." There is continually a suggestion that the effect of this deferral will be awful: having been allowed to "fester like a sore," the dream will not be contained, as by Dunbar's mask, but may instead "run." At the end of the poem, Hughes suggests that it may even "explode," the pressure of years of oppression reaching a boiling point. Perhaps Hughes's most effective trick in this poem is that he does not answer his own question—he does not don a mask for the reader, reassuring them that things are steady and certain. Rather, he leaves the reader to dwell on the question: what will happen?