Page 15
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Is it Fear" turns swashbuckling fantasy into a meditation on racialized beauty, stylized violence, and the elegant disguises hatred gives itself.
Earl Flyn's and Earol Flinn arrive as figures of cinematic bravado, but the poem strips romance away by placing strangulation and spectacle in the same frame. "Hatred has its abstractions too" is the key line, because it suggests that cruelty survives by becoming ornamental, even courtly. The handwritten Films annotation makes the ending more explicitly self-aware about spectacle, while the prairie charge remains dangerous even in fiction.
Ts it Fear asks who are these dark skinned Earl Flyn's, builds toward a neck sash rather than a blade, and ends with Earl Flinn himself at the head of five hundred riders which even in fiction is very dangerous.