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Notes on Poetry:

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (Themes)


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

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.”

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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

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.”

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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
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

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“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.

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, by Craig Raine

Craig Raine is a British poet, born in 1944, who is known as an exponent of “Martian
poetry”, by which is meant the expression of familiar concepts in unfamiliar ways. The
term derived from his poem “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home”, which was first
published in the “New Statesman” in 1977.
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One does not need to believe in Martians to enjoy this poem, only in the concept of
being able to perceive human behaviour and institutions with complete detachment, as
though one had never come across them before. Or rather, as Craig Raine does, to
express one’s impressions of humanity in terms that seem strange and puzzling at first
and need a little working out before one realises what it is to which the poet is referring.
It is in working out the puzzles that the reader derives a lot of fun from this poem.

The poem

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings


and some are treasured for their markings –

they cause the eyes to melt


or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but


sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight


and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish


like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.


It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside –


a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film


to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist


or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,


that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it


to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up

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deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer


openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.


They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt


and everyone’s pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die,


they hide in pairs

and read about themselves –


in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Discussion

“A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” comprises 34 lines arranged in unrhymed


couplets, with the sense sometimes confined to a couplet and sometimes spilling over
into the next one. The use of couplets is therefore only a device to make the poem
easier to read on the page.

The first puzzle is given the name “Caxtons”, which are “mechanical birds with many
wings … [that] cause the eyes to melt /or the body to shriek without pain.” Although
these “birds” have never been seen to fly, “sometimes they perch on the hand”. It may
seem a little incongruous that our Martian does not know the word “book” but does
know that William Caxton invented printing! That said, it is the outsider’s description of
crying and laughing that strikes the reader most forcibly.

The poem then moves on to describe two forms of weather, namely mist and rain. Mist
is “when the sky is tired of flight / and rests its soft machine on the ground”, which is not
only perceptive but a rather beautiful description of what mist is. Then comes a very
different account of rain, “when the earth is television”, which is a wholly unexpected
piece of imagery. However, just as one can adjust the brightness of a TV screen, so
does rain have “the property of making colours darker”.

In describing how a car works the Martian turns everything inside out, in terms of how a
human might regard things. The reader has also to imagine that this Martian has read
something about cars but very little, so that just as books are “Caxtons” the only car
available is the “Model T”. This is “a room with the lock inside” such that the key “is
turned to free the world / for movement”. He then presents a puzzle with “there is a

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film / to watch for anything missed”. Just as movies appear on screens, large and small,
so does the outside world pass by when seen in the car’s rear-view mirror.

The Martian’s idea of time is that it is “tied to the wrist / or kept in a box”, but he is also
able to assign an inappropriate human quality to time by describing it as “ticking with
impatience”.

The most intriguing puzzle in the poem is that of the “haunted apparatus” that “snores
when you pick it up”. This thing can cry, and humans then “carry it / to their lips and
soothe it to sleep / with sounds.” Just as with the watches and clocks mentioned above,
the Martian cannot distinguish between organic and inorganic objects, with the result
that the reader might think that a baby or a cat is being referred to, whereas it soon
becomes clear that this “apparatus” is a dial telephone that can be woken by “tickling
with a finger”.

The poem ends by concentrating on human habits, notably their frequent recourse to “a
punishment room / with water but nothing to eat.” Given that they lock the door and
then “suffer the noises / alone”, one can soon see how a Martian night confuse a toilet
with a prison cell. Finally, humans “hide in pairs” and their dreaming is described as
“read[ing] about themselves / in colour, with their eyelids shut”.

As mentioned above, it is important not to take the concept of a Martian visiting Planet
Earth too seriously. Indeed, many of the observations would work just as well if spoken
by a child. The use of the Martian is therefore a narrative device for “seeing ourselves
as others see us” and pointing to the strangeness of some of the actions of humans if
removed from their context. That said, the Martian still comes across as a believable
character with his own personality. His ignorance of what is really going on, and his
dogmatic pronouncements based purely on his observations, give him a persona that
amuses as he manages both to interpret human matters in mechanical terms and
inorganic things in terms of living ones (the tired sky, impatient time, a snoring
telephone, etc).

The Martian’s muddle-headedness works because the reader is reminded of how


humans are often just as confused when faced with things that they do not understand.
The poem succeeds by focusing on concepts that, for most readers, need no
explanation and showing that if the context and familiarity are stripped away they could
appear to be very puzzling indeed. The reader can laugh at the Martian but must also
bear in mind that anyone, when thrown into a completely new environment that need
not be all that far from home, can make similar mistakes that would strike those “in the
know” as being equally deserving of ridicule.

‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ Analysis


Based on the first six lines, the reader can see that the poem is a description of human ways seen through the
eyes of a Martian. Upon doing some research I have found that the speaker uses the word “Caxtons” to refer to
books possibly because 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

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birds, they are marked in ways that give them value. Birds can be distinguished by their colours and books by
their words. Because the Martian 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 five and six, the speaker returns again to the comparison of books to birds, looking at the way that
humans hold books, to the Martian, a book in a person’s hands looks like a bird perching on something.
In the fourth stanza yet another comparison is made, this time between a man made item and a natural thing. By
saying that “Mist is when the sky is tired of flight, and rests its’ soft machine on the ground.” The Martian could be
suggesting that the sky is like vessel of some sort, and also, it’s quite difficult to see the sky when the ground is
covered in fog, hence the idea that the sky is resting itself on the ground. In the fifth stanza, the speaker returns
back to the image of the book. This is quite a complicated image to visualise as it says; “then the world is dim and
bookish, like engravings under tissue paper.” I think this means that the whole world looks ‘black and white’
referring to “bookish” and engravings could be referring to buildings, trees, etc and these things usually have very
hard edges so when mist or night comes it’s like looking at those things through tissue paper therefore they would
look softer and possibly more blurry. I think this deepens our own understanding of how mystifying the earth could
be to someone who has never experienced it before.
“Rain is when the earth is television. It has the properties of making colours darker.” There are several ways to
look at these lines. One way is to think of rain as being a machine, in this case television. Television generally
makes true colours darker so that it is easier to view. Rain also makes “colours darker” by distorting our view of
what is really there. Another way of looking at it is to think literally of the static that frequently appears on
television sets. We often call this kind of static ‘rain’ or ‘snow’.
The seventh and eighth stanzas are talking about a car. This is easier to decipher than some of the other stanzas
as Raine refers to "Model T" which is a car that was made by Ford and was produced from 1908 to 1927. "Model
T is a room with the locks inside” Raine says it is a room because you go inside of the car and you are away from
the outside world. You need a key to turn the car on and off and to lock the car, which could be referring to “a key
is turned to free the world” which could also mean that once you turn the key in a car you are able to freely roam
the world and “for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed.” Raine could be talking about
a speed camera.
In this next stanza the poet is describing a watch or a clock. He uses the phrase “Ticking with impatience” which I
think is quite effective as ‘ticking’ is all a clock or watch really does and depending on the type of clock it is, it
could be impatient to reach the next hour when it can do something other than ‘tick’, such as chime.
In stanzas ten to twelve, I first thought Raine was referring to a baby, however when I re-read the three stanzas I
saw “haunted apparatus” and it became apparent to me that Raine is in fact actually talking about a telephone.
“Snores when you pick it up” could mean the repetitive dial tone that you hear before you actually start dialling
and “their lips soothe it to sleep” means having a conversation and finishing it, which would tie in with the phone
‘sleeping’ and “they wake it up deliberately by tickling it with a finger” could mean someone dialling a new number.
In the next three stanzas, the Martian describes a “punishment room”. If you piece together the different bits of
evidence from this section, the humour is quite apparent. Raine says “only the young are allowed to suffer
openly”. I presume he is referring to infants not being potty-trained and having to have their nappies changed,
more often than not, in public. Also, I’m sure that, to an alien, the sound of a flushing toilet must be extremely
strange, and it might even think that the person who just entered the bathroom was making those noises
themselves. That could be what Raine meant when he wrote “suffer the noises” and if the Martian was in fact
talking about a bathroom or someone using the bathroom that would also explain why he wrote “everyone’s pain
has a different smell”.

Raine has saved these last two stanzas for the end because they are talking about the end of the day. “At night,
when all the colours die” he is referring to the sun setting and darkness covering the world, eliminating colour.
“They hide in pairs” this means couples settling down to go to bed; hiding could mean them sleeping underneath a
duvet or something similar “and read about themselves in colour, with their eyelids shut.” This last line, I think, is
quite obvious in what it is referring to. “Read about themselves in colour” I think is talking about people dreaming,
in particular, about themselves, because it also says “with their eyelids shut”. And this also symbolises the end of
the day.

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home by


Craig Raine
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A Martian Sends a Postcard Home by Craig Raine is poem full of symbolism, which is
used by the author to attract the readers attention to the unusual characteristics of the
usual things.

The entire poem consists of colorful and whimsical metaphors, which describe usual and
habitual things which surround us in our everyday life. It takes time and requires
imagination in order to “guess” what the author means under certain metaphors of his
poem. The title of the poem is very symbolic. Only after the reading of the poem it
becomes evident that Martin, who writeы this letter is not a person from Earth since he
does not know basic things and basic names of the things, which make our reality. Raine
describes our reality through the eyes of an alian, who does not know the names of the
things and their functions. What is notable, the author treats all things described like
objects, which possess thoughts and feelings. Everything we read about in the poem,
including books, phones, cars and so on is described like living objects.

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Rich with metaphors and symbolism, this poem creates a unique world instead of our
habitual reality. First three stanzas speak about the book. The author compares them to
birds, “Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings / and some are treasured for their
markings - / they cause the eyes to melt / or the body to shriek without pain” (Raine,
lines 1-4). Caxtons, which he uses for common name is a name of a first publisher. Next
several stanzas speak about a fog. The author does not name it directly, and describes it
as a time, when “Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on
ground” (Raine, lines 7-8). Rain he compares to television. Next stanzas speak about a
car, naming it a “Model T”. Raine gives a car magic power and according to him it is able
to free the world for movement. The readers can guess that Raine speaks about the car
when they read about locks inside and its ability to move. Speaking about watches he
descirbes them as the very time, which is either tided to hand or put into box.

Tenth, eleventh and twelfth stanzas speak about the phone. Raine calls it a “haunted
apparatus” and names different way people use in order to make it keep silence. “If the
ghost cries, they carry it / to their lips and soothe it to sleep / with sounds” (Raine, lines
21-23). Bathroom is compared to suffering room. This metaphor creates a very
unexpected connection between its true function and the one, described by the author. He
makes very good and exact observations about children and grown ups, who use this
room, but gives other function to it. “Adults go to a punishment room / with water but
nothing to eat. / They lock the door and suffer the noises / alone” (Raine, lines 26-27).
This unexpected twist of the meaning makes it difficult for the readers to understand the
true name of the “suffering room” described by the author. In last two stanzas Raine
describes dreaming like “reading about themselves”. He knows that people usually see
themselves and their close ones in their dreams and speaks about it in his last stanzas.

The poem is a very skillful interpretation of common objects and mechanisms, which
surround us every day. Here the author perfectly passes to the readers feelings of a
person, who does not know true functions of the mechanisms described and creates his
own explanations to the world around him. Knowing nothing about the world around him,
the author of the letter explains what he sees and the readers can very vividly see that
reality and objects, which surround them, can have much more than one interpretation.
Most of the people spend little time thinking about things, which surround them. Raine not
only reflects about things around him, but also creates new interpretations. New vision of
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the reality breaks our usual ideas about things and objects and that is one of the main
functions of this poem. Raine achieves this effect due to unexpected use of metaphors and
symbols. He breaks usual connections between the subjects and creates new ones.

The poem goes deeper than describing our everyday life as a succession of bright and
unusual metaphors. Raine wants the readers to understand that paying to much attention
to the mechanisms around us, we miss an important part of our life.

Routing and busy lifestyle prevents people from real world, which became for them only a
combination of symbols of different things. Usually people do not think about time, they
look at their watches and hurry up. They do not think about their journey when they sit
into the car, they think only about the destination. Raine does just an opposite. He
switches readers’ focus to the functions of different objects around us and pays no
attention to their forms and names. As he wrote himself in one of the interviews, “I’m not
interested in ingratiating myself with the reader as an entirely sensitive, right-minded,
liberal poet who could figure in the New Statesman and not shame anybody. I’m not
interested in writing poems which end with thumping statements; I’m interested in
making objects. I think poems are machines in the sense that Baudelaire called
Delacroix’s paintings machines; they have to work as artistic objects. (Haffenden 185.)
That is the main purpose of Raine’s writing – to make artistic objects out of mechanisms,
which surround people in their everyday life. In his poem Raine proves that any
mechanism can be turned to an artistic object and he seems the main function of an artist
in creating this new connections between different mechanisms and reality. These
unexpected connections brake usual way of thinking and make people see unusual sides
of the usual things. That is one of the main function of an art in general – creating
another perspective of the reality and passing it to people – and Raine does a perfect job
creating this different perspective.

Title: A Martian Sends a Postcard Home by Craig Raine. The title suggests that the poem will be about a
martian writing and sending a postcard home from some planet.

Paraphrase: In this poem a martian talks about earth in very unique ways. A martian gives his
observation on the world. He interprets worldly objects in the way he sees it. For example, the martian
compares mist to the sky getting tired and falling. In another example, the martian describes a bathroom
as, "... a punishment room with water but nothing to eat. They lock the door and suffer the noises alone.
No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell."

Connotation:

Form- The speaker is writing a letter home in form of a postcard about the things he encounters on earth
such as caxtons, rain, model Ts, etc. His letter is similar to an epistle in the sense that it is a legnthy
letter, but it isn't as formal as epistles typically are. It is written in a series of unrhyming couplets, with
metaphors consistently scattered throught. For example, Rain is when the earth is television. It has the
properites of making colours darker. Another example is a comparison of watches and clocks; "But time
is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience."

Point of view- The person writing the letter, who,in this case, is a martian. He writes home about the
strange and wonderful objects found on earth.

Figurative Language- For the most part, this poem is written in free verse, in other words, there is no

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obvioius poetic linkage from one line to the next. The author uses many metaphors throught, as
mentioned before. The first stanza is a rhyming couplet.

Diction- The diction of this poem allows it to be read by anyone over the fifth grade.

Imagery- This poem brings to mind images of the multiwinged caxtons, which really refers to William
Caxton, and the paper that his printing press made. It conjures images of a foggy morning, with an alien
staring out attempting to make sense of the phenomina. He looks at watches and clocks and believes that
such devices hold time itself inside. He rides in cars and believe that cars move the world, not cars move
along the world.

Symbolism- This poem is rich in symbolism for the sheer fact that the martian hardly refers to anything
by its real name. He describes paper as, "...mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings-- they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without
pain." Never does he say the word paper to make the connection, but he describes it in such a way that,
with a little research, it is easy to tell that he is talking about paper.

Other Devices-

Attitude: The attitude sounds rather matter of fact and somewhat mesmerized. The martian speaks of
things we take for granted, such as bathrooms, and describes them in odd ways.

Shifts: A shift occurs in between the stanza speaking of watches and clocks and the one describing a
phone. The author speaks somewhat matter of fact like about clocks and watches, then sounds a bit
fearful as he talks about the "haunted apparatus."

Title: The author used the title to show that a martian is describing what he notices on planet earth. The
poem is the post card from the martian to his home planet. Therefore, the poem is rightly titled, A
Martian Sends a Post Card Home. The title tells a background of the poem. Without it, we wouldn't
know that anything about who the speaker is, or why it was written.

Theme: Despite the seemingly light-hearted meaning of this poem, it does posess a deeper meaning. It
clearly demonstrates that what one person may use everyday, understand, and even take for granted,
another may be mystified and unfamiliar with it. For example, in today's time, some elderly can't tell
heads or tails about computers, whereas some of the youth spend all of their free time on them. Perhaps
a better way to sum up the theme is, "One man's trash is another man's treasure."

Epistle: specially long, formal letter


Speaker:the voice that talks to the reader in a poem, as the narrator does in a work of fiction. The
speaker in the poem is not necessarily the poet.
Metaphor: a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not
literally denote in order to suggest a similarity
Free Verse: unrhymed verse without a consistent metrical pattern
Couplet: a stanza consisting of two successive lines of verse; usually rhymed

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

http://www.answers.com/topic/a-martian-sends-a-postcard-home-poem-2
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings

and some are treasured for their markings..

they cause the eyes to melt

or the body to shriek with pain

I have never seen one fly, but

sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight

and rests its soft machine on the ground:

then the world is dim and bookish

like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television

it has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside ...

a lock is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film

to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist

or kept in a box ticking with impatience.

In homes a haunted apparatus sleeps,

that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it

to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. A yet they wake it up

deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer

http://www.answers.com/topic/a-martian-sends-a-postcard-home-poem-2
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water, but nothing to eat.

They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt

and everyone’s pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die,

they hide in pairs

and read about themselves ...

in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Poem Analysis from Azzam :.

"A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" is a poem with seventeen stanzas. All of the stanzas have two lines.

At first the title of this poem was kind of tricky for me because it made me think that it was about an

actual Martian. It took me a while to figure out that he was talking about things that happen in everyday

life in earth. Basically something a Martian would send home if he was on a vacation to earth is what the

poem focuses on.

Analysis

Raine uses several riddles in this poem to show what the Martian sees when he comes to earth. He does

a very good job in doing this. For example, the first stanza of the poem is talking about a book. Caxton

was the first English printer of books. Mechanical birds with wings refers to the pages in a book. By

saying they are treasured for their markings means that if a person enjoys reading a book they will

treasure it. Raine also refers to a book in the next four lines.

Stanza six comes out straight forward and lets us realize that Raine is talking about fog. It uses words

such as clouds. By using context clues we understand the true interpretation. When Raine says "rain is

when the earth is television" he means that the TV is snowy. This is a very good metaphor for rain

because it does kind of make the TV look like it is raining.

http://www.answers.com/topic/a-martian-sends-a-postcard-home-poem-2
The seventh and eighth stanzas are talking about a car. This is simple as Raine refers to "Model T."

Raine gives good examples of the car in a Martian’s eyes. For instance, "Model T is a room with the

locks inside." I like this line a lot because I have never seen a car in this way before. Raine says it is a

room because you go inside of the car and you are away from the outside world. You need a key to turn

the car on and off and to lock the car.

In this next stanza Raine did a great job of describing a watch or clock. "Ticking with impatience" is

right of the button. That is all a watch and clock do is tick for twenty four hours a day.

Stanza ten, eleven, and twelve are on the subject of a telephone. All the phone is what Raine writes in

this poem. It does not do anything until you pick it up and that is what Raine is saying. The cries of the

ghost is when it rings. Then you "talk to it", or answer it and when you are finished "put it back to sleep"

or hang it up. Yes, we do "deliberately wake it and tickle it with a finger" when we answer it or call

someone else.

A "punishment room with just water" is a bathroom. I just love these next three stanzas because I love

the bathroom. I just don’t think of it as a "punishment room." When Raine writes "only the young are

allowed to suffer openly" he is talking about a baby getting their diapers changed in the open. Yet adults

have to go to the bathroom and suffer our pain alone. Raine had exceptional use of metaphors to

describe the bathroom.

The last two stanzas are about sleeping and dreaming. "When the colours die" is when we go to bed.

"Reading about ourselves with our eyelids shut" is basically saying we are dreaming of ourselves. Raine

put this at a good spot in the poem because the end of the poem symbolizes the end of the day.

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home – Analysis

Posted on April 6, 2011by vincentmli

The poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home by Craig Raine depicts exactly what the title says:

a Martian sending a postcard home. However, we must take into consideration that the Martian is

actually on Earth, sending a postcard back to his own home; therefore the descriptions of our everyday

http://www.answers.com/topic/a-martian-sends-a-postcard-home-poem-2
objects are depicted so bizarrely. Every detail alludes to items as well as actions seen on Earth. In the

poem Raine illustrates several things from the Martian’s perspective: a book, fog, car, clock, telephone,

bathroom, and dream. The author applies a very unique technique in describing all these things, he

breaks down each object into unrecognisable parts and compares them to something similar. A book is

illustrated and compared to a mechanical bird with many wings. The flapping wings of a bird imitates

the turning pages of a book. Raine also says “some are treasured for their markings” referring to that fact

that some books are cherished by individuals because of their “markings”, the words written in them.

One final things the author does to compare a book to a bird is to remove certain qualities of a bird that

don’t fit in the description of a book, such as flight, but also emphasize a similarity; a book sitting

compared to a bird perching on someone’s hand. This kind of dismantling of objects and analysing them

in a new perspective is done for every object Raine depicts. Another excellent example of this would be

the author’s depiction of a car. The author says, “Model T is a room with a lock inside”, from an outside

look, a car is nothing more than an enclosed space, exactly what a room is. Raine removes features of a

room that don’t apply to a car, a room doesn’t lock from the inside but a car does. The ending of the

poem is the most intriguing since it doesn’t depict anything tangible but rather the concept of dreaming

or the action of sleeping. Raine states that “at night when all colours die, they hide in pairs and read

about themselves — in colour, with their eyelids shut”. It is very clear in these last stanza’s Raine is

illustrating a scene where two people are sleeping. The night is dark and no colour can be seen; but in

our dreams, where we learn or “read” about ourselves, we see in colour. This is the only thing that the

author doesn’t compare to another object but simply analyses what dreaming truly is, using the simplest

of descriptions

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