Which Choice Is Not True About The Poem Midway

Which Choice Is Not True About the Poem "Midway"? Debunking Common Misconceptions

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” is one of the most anthologized and analyzed poems in American literature, a piercing exploration of the forced duality experienced by Black Americans in the post-Reconstruction era. However, a frequent point of confusion in literature classrooms and online quizzes is a poem often misattributed or confused with it: “Midway”. The question “which choice is not true about the poem ‘Midway’?” typically presents a series of statements, some accurate and one deliberately false. To answer this, one must first correctly identify the poem in question and then separate enduring facts from pervasive myths. The most common incorrect choice stems from a fundamental misreading of the poem’s form, speaker, and central message, often blending details from Dunbar’s broader work with this specific piece.

Identifying the Correct Poem: “Midway” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

First, it is crucial to specify that the poem in question is almost certainly “Midway” from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1899 collection Lyrics of Lowly Life. It begins with the iconic lines: “Away down yonder in the middle of the world, / There’s a little brown church in a little brown dell.” This is not “We Wear the Mask.” The confusion arises because both poems are by Dunbar and deal, in different ways, with themes of identity and concealment. “Midway” is a narrative, dialect poem that tells the story of a young Black man’s journey from the rural South to the urban North, his disillusionment, and his ultimate spiritual return. Understanding this narrative is key to spotting the false statement.

Common True Statements (The Foundation)

Typical multiple-choice options about “Midway” that are true include:

1. It is written in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) dialect. This is accurate. Dunbar masterfully employs the phonetic and grammatical structures of the dialect to convey the voice and perspective of his protagonist, a choice that was both celebrated for its authenticity and critiqued for its perceived limitations.
2. It depicts a Great Migration narrative before the term existed. The poem, published in 1899, prefigures the mass movement of Black Southerners to Northern cities by decades. It follows a character who leaves the South for Chicago, experiences urban hardship and alienation, and ultimately returns south, making it a complex precursor to later migration literature.
3. Its central theme involves a crisis of faith and belonging. The protagonist’s journey is both physical and spiritual. He leaves the “little brown church” and its simple faith, finds only emptiness in the city, and grapples with a sense of lost connection before seeking reconciliation.
4. The poem uses the journey motif as a structural and symbolic device. The literal travel from South to North and back mirrors the internal journey of the soul, making the geography a map of the protagonist’s psychological state.

The Most Common FALSE Choice: Misattributing Form and Speaker

The statement most frequently presented as the false choice in such questions is a variation of:

“The poem is a sonnet that expresses the personal, internal conflict of a single, unnamed speaker using a formal, standardized English.”

This single statement is incorrect on three fundamental levels, making it the clear “not true” option.

• It is NOT a sonnet. “Midway” is a narrative poem of 32 lines, structured in quatrains (four-line stanzas). It does not adhere to the 14-line structure, iambic pentameter, or specific rhyme scheme (like ABABCDCDEFEFGG) of a Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. Its form is that of a folk ballad or a simple narrative stanza, suited to storytelling.
• The speaker is NOT a singular, introspective “I” in formal English. The poem is narrated in the third person (“He,” “the boy”). We are told the story of a specific character, not given a first-person confessional monologue. Furthermore, the language is dialect, not standardized English. The voice is that of a communal storyteller using the vernacular to relate the tale of the community member.
• The conflict is NOT primarily presented as a personal, internal one in the moment. While the protagonist experiences internal turmoil, the poem shows his external journey and its consequences—his actions in Chicago, his return—rather than telling us his ongoing internal debate in a soliloquy. The conflict is dramatized through plot and setting.

Why This Misconception Persists

This particular false statement is so effective because it deliberately conflates “Midway” with another, more famous Dunbar poem: “We Wear the Mask.”

• “We Wear the Mask” is a shorter, 14-line poem that functions as a lyric sonnet (though not a strict formal sonnet, its concision and turn are sonnet-like). It uses a first-person plural speaker (“we”) in formal, standardized English to articulate a universal, internal conflict about hiding one’s true feelings. The statement in the false choice perfectly describes “We Wear the Mask,” not “Midway.”
• Quiz makers exploit this common conflation. A student who knows Dunbar’s work vaguely might associate all his poems with the mask metaphor and formal style, leading them to incorrectly select a true statement about “We Wear the Mask” as the answer for “Midway.”

Deeper Analysis: What “Midway” Is Truly About

To fully understand why the sonnet/formalism statement is false, one must grasp what “Midway” actually achieves.

The poem is a social narrative in dialect. Its power lies in its storytelling. The “little brown church” represents a specific, rooted Southern Black community and its traditions. The journey to Chicago represents the lure of modernity, industrial opportunity, and escape from Jim Crow, but the poem portrays this not as liberation but as spiritual exile. The city is described in bleak, impersonal terms: “the great, grim city,” “the street’s dull roar.” The