Notes on Poetry:

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (Themes)

Contents:

Introduction
Author Biography
Poem Summary
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
For Further Study

Author Biography
Craig Raine was born on December 3, 1944, in Bishop Auckland, England, to Norman Edward Raine
and Olive Marie Raine. Raine’s father was both a prize-fighter and a faith healer who believed that he
knew when people were cured because “he felt burning coals in the palms of his hands.” Raine’s
childhood provided him with more than enough grist to fashion poems with speakers who see the
everyday world in unconventional and often strange ways. After taking degrees from Oxford, Raine
married Ann Pasternak Slater, the niece of Boris Pasternak, the highly regarded Russian poet and
novelist of Dr. Zhivago. In his first collection of poems, The Onion, Memory, Raine established his
penchant for elaborately describing the physical world from unusual perspectives. The result is often a
surface of bizarre images that shocks us into self-recognition at the same time that it creates distance
from what we had thought was familiar. This technique has much in common with what Russian critic
Victor Shklovsky called “defamilarization,” or the ability to make the real seem strange. Raine’s second
volume of poems, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, cemented his position as one of the most
innovative British poets of his generation.

Raine has worked in and out of academia. He has lectured at various universities, been a broadcaster for
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and was the poetry editor for Faber & Faber between 1981 and
1991. He currently is a fellow at New College, Oxford University.

Poem Summary
Lines 1-6

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Based on the first six lines, we understand that the poem will be a description of human culture seen
through the eyes of a Martian. The speaker uses the word “Caxtons” to refer to books. Englishman
William Caxton, who lived during the fifteenth century, was the first person to print books in English. In
these lines, the Martian compares books to birds. Like birds, books have wings (pages), and, like birds,
they are marked in ways that give them value. Birds can be distinguished by their color(s), books by the
words they contain. Because the speaker does not know the words for “cry” or “laugh,” he says that
books can “cause the eyes to melt / or the body to shriek without pain,” referring to humans’ emotional
response when they read books. In lines 5 and 6, the speaker returns again to the comparison of books to
birds, focusing on the way in which humans frequently hold books. To the Martian, a book in a person’s
hands looks like a bird perching.

Lines 7-10

Again, a comparison is made between a manufactured item and a natural thing. By saying that “Mist is
when the sky is tired of flight,” the speaker is suggesting that the sky is like a vessel of some sort,
presumably a flying saucer or a spaceship. It is often difficult to see the sky when the ground is shrouded
in fog, hence the idea that the sky is resting itself on the ground. In lines 9 and 10, the speaker returns to
the image of the book. We can understand this comparison if we see the outlines of things in the world
— e.g., buildings, trees, mountains, etc. — as looking like words, or “engravings under tissue paper.”
This is a complicated image to visualize, but it deepens our own understanding of how mysterious the
earth could be to someone who has never experienced it before. Combined with some of the other
descriptions of the natural world, this image, in effect, “de-naturalizes” nature for the reader.

Lines 11-12

There are several ways to read these lines. One way is to think of rain as being like a machine, in this
case television. Like television, rain makes “colours darker” by shrouding our view of what is really
there. This reading also raises the question of what “is” really there, suggesting that reality itself is
colored by the cultural lenses one brings to the act of perception. Another way of reading these lines is to
think, literally, of the static that frequently appears on television sets. We often refer to such static as rain
or snow.

Lines 13-16

A Model T is an automobile. Not knowing the words for the parts of a car, the speaker instead refers to it
as “a room” (the seats and the space inside the car) “with the lock inside” (the ignition into which the
key fits). After the car is started, it moves. The Martian compares the experience of seeing things go by,
to “free[ing] the world / for movement ...” The “film” is the rearview mirror. We can see what we missed
by looking at it, and in this way, it is like a movie.

Lines 17-18

The Martian implicitly criticizes human culture in these lines, suggesting that human beings have
imprisoned time by tying it to the wrist (wrist-watch) or keeping it in a box (a clock). By saying that it is
“ticking with impatience,” the Martian subtly mocks human beings’ obsession with measuring time, also
suggesting that the ways in which human beings commodify time (by making it into a thing) is
inappropriate at best and useless at worse.

Lines 19-24

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From this point on, the Martian attempts to describe the domestic life of human beings. The first
metaphor he uses compares a baby to a telephone. The phone is “haunted” because it periodically
“cries,” or rings. Its snoring is, of course, the dial tone. The speaker compares the ways that people
attempt to calm a baby to the way that they talk on the telephone: “they carry it / to their lips / and
soothe it to sleep / with sound.” Extending the metaphor, the speaker notices the similarity between
tickling a baby and dialing a number.

Lines 25-30

Continuing with his observations of the generational relationships between humans, the Martian
describes how using the bathroom is different for adults and children. Whereas children “are allowed to
suffer / openly,” “Adults go to a punishment room / with water but nothing to eat.” Here, the Martian
returns to the theme of imprisonment, which he initially suggested in his description of time in lines 17
and 18. He suggests that the ritual of going to the bathroom is a punishment of sorts, because adult
human beings do it alone. Everyone is punished, or punishes themselves, because everyone goes to the
bathroom. Raine adds a comic touch when he says that “No one is exempt / and everyone’s pain has a
different smell.”

Lines 31-34

This final metaphor returns us to the Martian’s initial comparison, only here he is comparing dreaming
to reading. “The colours die” when the sun goes down. It is interesting to note that the speaker chooses
to describe a couple in these last lines rather than an individual human being. Taken with the previous
two descriptions, this last one seems to suggests that human beings’ primary mode of living is in
families.

Style
A free-verse epistle written in couplets, “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” employs a series of
metaphors to highlight the differences in perception between human and Martian culture. An epistle is a
letter (in this case, a postcard) intended for a distant individual or group of people (in this case,
Martians). Well-known writers of epistolary poems include eighteenth-century British writer Alexander
Pope and twentieth-century American poet Richard Hugo. Tone is the stance the speaker takes towards
his or her subject, in this case human beings and their culture. The Martian’s tone is complicated, but is
primarily one of curiosity and wonder.

Raine juxtaposes unexpected elements to create metaphors that make the familiar seem strange. For
example, he describes a telephone by showing what it has in common with a baby. The vehicle of this
metaphor, or the image that he uses to represent the phone, is a baby, and the tenor — the subject of the
comparison — is the phone itself. Because Raine’s comparisons are initially so odd, readers often get
stuck on the vehicle and think that he is literally describing a baby. It is only by stretching our minds to
look at the world from another point of view that we finally understand the real subject of the
description.

Themes

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Appearances and Reality

Poets and philosophers have long asked if what we see is reality or illusion. In his “Allegory of the
Cave” Plato claimed that the world we experience is a world of appearances — an imperfect copy of the
real. The human world is a shadow world of the pure forms that exist in the realm of ideas. In “A
Martian Sends a Postcard Home,” Raine underscores the notion that experience itself is insufficient for
understanding the world, because we are all bound by personal and cultural ideas of what is. Another
way of saying this is that experience is at once an interpretation and something to be interpreted. For
example, an activity that we frequently take for granted, reading, is a foreign concept for the Martian,
whose experience exists outside of earthly conventions. He cannot conceive that words can make a
human being laugh or cry, nor can he comprehend those responses. He describes what human beings do
when they sleep as “reading,” implicitly seeing dreams as kinds of books. Although the Martian does not
have the language to literally name the things and activities of human culture, by making connections to
his own experience and culture, he is able to make sense of humanity and, in the process, allow (human)
readers to see their own world in a fresh way. As a result, we see how our perceptions are caught up in
our desires and how what we consider to be real is tied to our own conventions of language and naming.

Culture Clash

“A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” illustrates the confusion and comic absurdity that occurs when a
foreigner attempts to explain a new place to his own people. The clash in cultures is evident in the
Martian’s descriptions of earthly things and activities. These descriptions tell us as much about the
Martian as they do about humanity. By describing natural elements such as rain and mist in terms of
machines, the Martian suggests that his world is void of such elements but full of machines. This
requires readers to attempt to envision a world without mist and rain, a task at least as difficult as the
Martian’s. However, there are descriptions that suggest the Martian’s familiarity with human concepts.
For example, by describing a telephone as a “haunted apparatus” and its ring as the cry of a ghost, the
Martian shows that he is aware of human ideas of the afterlife. Even if we do not consciously recognize
it, the Martian’s awareness allows us to be more sympathetic to him, because he seems more like us, and
less like a Martian. In this way, the poem can be seen as an extended metaphor for how various human
cultures act and interact with one another. Although the Martian’s descriptions of human beings are, for
the most part, neutral and often comic, human beings’ descriptions of one another — especially
descriptions based on ethnicity, national identity, race, sexuality, and gender — are frequently loaded
with judgements, stereotypes, and insults, which only exacerbate tensions rooted in cultural differences.

Topics for Further Study

 Write two poems from the point of view of animals attempting to explain the behavior of human
beings. First, write from the point of view of a domestic animal (e.g., a cat or dog), and then
write one from the point of view of a “wild” animal (e.g., a lion or penguin).
 Research attempts to discover extraterrestrial life on other planets and write an essay exploring
the reasons and hopes for what such a discovery might tell us about ourselves.
 Discuss how a martian might describe the economic and political systems of the United States.

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