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.” 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
Media Adaptations
- The following web site provides daily weather conditions on Mars: http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu/MartianSunTimes/.
- Faber & Faber has issued a cassette of Thom Gunn and Craig Raine reading their poetry.
- Carl Sagan’s book Contact, made into the 1997 movie of the same name, postulated that an alien life form could contact humans on earth.
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.”
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.
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.
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