"Mr. Fear" Poetry Blog

Mr. Fear
He follows us, he keeps track.
Each day his lists are longer.
Here, death, and here,
Something like it.

Mr. Fear, we say in our dreams,
What do you have for me tonight?
And he looks through his sack,
His black sack of troubles.

Maybe he smiles when he finds
The right one. Maybe he's sorry.
Tell me, Mr. Fear,
What must I carry

Away from your dream.
Make it small, please.
Let it fit in my pocket,
Let it fall through

The hole in my pocket.
Fear, let me have
A small brown bat
And a purse of crickets

Like the ones I heard
Singing last night
Out there in the stubbly field
Before I slept, and met you.
-Lawrence Raab

Lawrence Raab was born in 1946 in Massachusetts and often writes about human fallability and doubt and the fine lines of our lives. This poem definitely goes into those categories because Raab writes about the line between having fear and being given fear. The antecedant scenario was probably just Lawrence Raab being frightened and thinking about fear; maybe he was wishing for an entity to blame it on- "Mr. Fear."
The climax is a little difficult to find in this poem; it feels like it is leading up to something throughout the poem as a whole, but I saw the climax as being "make it small, please." It feels as though Raab is leading up to this point: let the fear he gives me be small. After that line, the emotion seems to coast down til he says, "before I slept, and met you."
This poem's tone seems to be a little pensive or pleading. He wonders about the nightmares and terrors we all get from this dark Santa-esque being and how we want the least amount of fear possible and go back to when we weren't afraid- when we had "a small brown bat and a purse of crickets like the ones I heard singing last night."