Anyone who has ever been told "you look upset" or "you're glowing today" knows that faces give us away. Anna M. Johnson's "Expressing Moods" starts from a playful question, what color do I feel today?, and ends by rejecting its own premise. The poem imagines a woman using makeup as an emotional language, choosing red for a riotous mood, pink for a joyful one, and pale rouge for a gloomy one. Then, in the final stanza, it pulls back and argues that feelings belong inside, in "inward grace," not "smeared loudly" across the skin.
The first three stanzas run on a neat pattern. Each opens with a question, "What color do I feel today?", "What color do my thoughts portray?", "What color says my soul today?", and each answers with a gesture of the hand. The verbs matter here: she "dash[es]" red on her cheek, "splash[es]" pink, and finally "paint[s]" a paler rouge. The first two are quick, impulsive, almost careless, which suits moods described as "wild imagination's play" and "fancy in a riot led." The third verb is slower and more deliberate, and the mood it serves is slower too. The sky is "low, and drab, and grey," a stacked line of adjectives that sags under its own weight, and the feelings are "dull with life's abuse." It is striking that the speaker's cheerfulness gets two stanzas of bright color while her sadness gets only a "paler" version of the same gesture. Even her low mood is expressed with makeup, just less of it.
The imagery of the poem's middle section is worth lingering over. In the second stanza, thought is compared to a "soaring bird on crest of day," a lovely, open image of lightness and height. Yet the very next lines drag that soaring spirit back down to earth: "I stop to think, / And splash my cheek with vivid pink." The contrast is gently comic. A bird in flight is reduced to a woman at a mirror, and that small deflation is where the poem's doubt begins to show.
That doubt becomes explicit in the fourth stanza, where the tone shifts from description to self-interrogation. "Whence comes this color scale to bear / Upon the feelings I must wear?" is the only place the speaker treats color as a burden rather than a game, and the word "must" is telling, since it suggests an expectation she did not choose. Then comes the sharpest word in the poem: "freak." Does nature call her "like a freak / To thus bedaub my chin and cheek?" "Bedaub" is an unflattering verb, clumsy and messy, the opposite of the elegant "paint." By the end of the stanza, the pretty ritual of the opening has been recast as something grotesque.
The final stanza resolves the argument. "Not so," she answers, firmly, and the logic is tidy: since "feeling waxes strong" and "colors must to thoughts belong," the thoughts do not need an external costume. The rhyme of "grace" with "face" ties the two ideas together at the poem's close, setting the inner quality against the outer surface. The last line, "Not smear them loudly on my face," uses a verb harsher than any before it. Dash, splash and paint have given way to smear, and the word "loudly" turns color into noise, something shouted rather than felt.
Formally, the poem is built to feel light and conversational. Each stanza is four lines of rhymed couplets (AABB: "today/play," "led/red"), and the lines move in a quick, bouncing rhythm close to iambic tetrameter. That sing-song regularity gives the poem the breezy feel of a nursery rhyme, which makes its final turn more effective. The tidy rhymes mirror the tidy surface of makeup itself, and when the speaker rejects the surface, the form quietly stays the same, a polished exterior arguing for the value of what lies beneath.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it argues with itself. It is easy to imagine a poem that simply celebrates self-expression through color. Instead, Johnson lets the speaker enjoy the game for three stanzas, then question it, then decide that real feeling does not need advertising. The poem suggests that depth of emotion and loudness of display are different things, and it makes that point with humor, a light touch, and a surprisingly firm last line.