Hiding our sadness and our fears, lying to the people we love, keeping our emotions to ourselves, all things that 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 be kind to people, always. “Richard Cory,” by Edwin Robinson and “We Wear The Mask,” by Paul Dunbar, both traditional poems that express that sadness that people hide and the act we perform for the people around us. Yet both are about different scenarios, one involving money and admiration, and another that is about hiding your 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 good-looking, wealthy, educated, and polite man who the people of the town "We Wear The Mask" conceived to speak to the fact that African Americans hide their anger and pain from white at the time. Dunbar writes in iambic pentameter, meaning he pairs unstressed and stressed syllables, giving the reading a more meaningful feel as 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 scheme Dunbar uses makes reading this poem very smooth and easy. Dunbar also uses metaphors when he says, “with hearts torn and bleeding we smile.” Throughout this poem, Dunbar uses many figurative devices to get his point across; his point is that we wear a mask to cover our sadness and lie to avoid telling people what we are really going through. Especially when Dunbar refrains, "let's put on the mask," to really make it prominent in the readers' minds. “We Wear The Mask” is a traditionally structured poem with fixed stanzas and repeated rhymes