Hiding our sadness and fears, lying to the people we love, keeping our emotions to ourselves, all things everyone does, sometimes without even knowing it. Edwin Robinson and Paul Dunbar are two poets who wrote about how everyone is fighting a battle that you may know nothing about, so you should always be nice to people. “Richard Cory” by Edwin Robinson and “We Wear The Mask” by Paul Dunbar are two traditional poems that express the sadness that people hide and the act we do for the people around us. Yet they both talk about different scenarios, one involving money and admiration, and another talking about hiding one's true feelings from people. “Richard Cory” by Edwin Robinson is a poem about a man who seems to have everything but is not truly happy. The character in the poem, Richard Cory, is a handsome, wealthy, educated, and polite man. The townspeople's "We Wear the Mask" was presented as African Americans hiding their anger and pain from whites. time. Dunbar writes in iambic pentameter, which means he pairs unstressed and stressed syllables, making the reading feel more meaningful the more you read it. He rhymes using couplets throughout the poem, rhyming "lies" and "eyes", "cunning" and "smile", showing the contrast between the two. The rhyme system used by Dunbar makes reading this poem very smooth and easy. Dunbar also uses metaphors when he says, “with torn and bleeding hearts we smile.” Throughout this poem, Dunbar uses many figurative devices to get his message across; his point of view is that we wear a mask to hide our sadness and we lie to avoid telling people what we are really experiencing. Especially when Dunbar refrains from saying "we wear the mask" to really highlight it in the readers' minds. “We Wear The Mask” is a traditional poem structured with fixed stanzas and repeated rhymes.