‘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 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.