Smiles
The face's most fluent lie, and its most disarming truth.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about smiles: real and performed, masks and joy, with craft techniques, mistakes to avoid and prompts in this free Writory guide.
What this theme is
A smile is the shortest text a face can publish, and the most ambiguous. It can mean welcome, apology, threat, seduction, customer service or pure joy, and the surrounding face decides which. Poems about smiles are poems about reading people: the real smile that reaches the eyes and folds the skin beside them, and the performed one that stops at the teeth. Between those two lies most of social life, and a great deal of poetry.
The theme also opens onto power. Who must smile, at work, in photographs, at strangers on the street, and who is free not to? A smile can be armour, currency or compliance. When Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote in 1896 of the mask that grins and lies, he made the smile poetry's sharpest image of what oppression does to the face.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose smiles because they are tiny plots. Every smile has a before and after, a cause and a cost, and a poem can unfold an entire relationship from one. The theme trains precision too: writing that someone smiled tells a reader nothing, and learning to catch the difference between a smirk, a wince-smile and a child's unguarded grin is an education in observation that improves every poem you will ever write.
Where it comes from
Dunbar's We Wear the Mask stands at the theme's centre, the grinning face as survival strategy under racism, written with a formal polish that makes the pain cut deeper. The Mona Lisa has kept poets and everyone else guessing for five centuries, proof that an ambiguous smile holds attention longer than an explained one. Blake's Songs of Innocence gave infancy its unguarded joy in 1789, and the arrival of photography created a new smile entirely: the one produced on demand, held too long, and archived in albums for poets to interrogate later.
The elements that carry it
- The eyes: genuine smiles crease them; performed smiles leave them untouched. That difference is a whole craft lesson.
- Photographs and the commanded smile: say cheese, hold it, the shutter's small dishonesty.
- Teeth: gaps, gold, braces, dentures, each one a biography.
- Mirrors, where people rehearse smiles before interviews, dates and difficult news.
- The service smile: shop counters, cabin crew, reception desks, worn like uniform.
Techniques that work
- Never write smiled without deciding what kind: locate it in muscles, eyes and timing, and let the specifics replace the verb.
- Use the smile as a hinge: place it at the poem's turn, where its meaning flips from warm to unsettling or the reverse.
- Write the mismatch: a smile at a funeral, through tears, during an argument. Smiles mean most where they do not belong.
- Withhold it: build a poem around a stern or grieving face and allow one smile in the final lines. Scarcity multiplies its wattage.
- Interrogate a photograph: who told them to smile, who did not manage it, and what happened an hour after the shutter.
Mistakes to avoid
- The smile that lit up the room: the theme's most exhausted line. Light-based smile imagery needs a decade off.
- Assuming smiles equal happiness. Half of literature's best smiles are armour, sales technique or grief in disguise.
- Describing only the mouth. A smile happens across the whole face and into the shoulders; the mouth alone is a diagram.
- Ending on a smile to resolve everything. A closing smile should complicate or cost something, not tie the bow.
An exercise
Spend a day collecting smiles in a notebook: the barista's, a stranger's during a phone call, your own caught in a shop window. For each, note what the eyes did. Then write a poem about the one smile that was hardest to read.
A challenge
Write a poem in which the same smile is described three times, by three different observers, and means something different to each. Let the reader decide who read it right.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about the family photograph where everyone is smiling except one person, and what you know now about that day.
Before you submit
- No smile lights up anything.
- Each smile is physically specific: eyes, timing, effort.
- At least one smile means something other than happiness.
- The poem knows who is required to smile and who chooses to.
- If the poem ends on a smile, the smile complicates rather than resolves.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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