“We Wear the Mask” uses another French form, the rondeau, a cousin to the triolet. Where do you find patterns of repetition, and how is that repetition effective at expressing the poem’s theme?

What will be an ideal response?

“We Wear the Mask” is a very skillfully done poem in a demanding form. By carefully observing its structure, students should be able to describe the following characteristics of the rondeau:

it is fifteen lines long, divided into three irregular stanzas;

its meter is predominately iambic tetrameter;

the opening phrase of the first line becomes a refrain that concludes the second and third stanzas;

the poem uses only two rime sounds;

the rime scheme is as follows (with R signifying the refrain): aabba aabR aabbaR.

There is structural repetition in the final stanza: the beginning of line 10, “We smile,” is paralleled by the beginning of line 12, “We sing”; in each case, the phrase is immediately followed by the word “but,” which serves to introduce a cry of secret pain and anguish that dramatically undercuts the public manifestations of good nature.
Even more noticeable, of course, is the repetition occasioned by the requirements of the rondeau form, the occurrence of the refrain at lines 9 and 15. In line 9, the phrase fits into the ironic context of the second stanza, in which the speaker rhetorically asks, in effect: Why should anyone care what we really feel? Shouldn’t we just show the face that the world wants to see from us, and not bother people with our troubles (even though those people are the cause of our suffering and could easily end it if they chose to)? By the end of the third stanza, the tone of bitter irony is unmistakable: the second and much more emphatic repetition of the title phrase, which closes the poem, drives home the sense of how damaging it is to be forced to live an existence that demands a false display of contentment and a concealment of profound suffering.