SOURCE: "Craig Raine's Poetry of Perception: Imagery in A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," in Dutch Quarterly Review, Vol. 15, No. 2, 1985, pp. 102-15.

[In the following essay, Forceville discusses the imagery of selected poems from A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, focusing particularly on the implications of Raine's metaphors and similes.]

Craig Raine is one of those contemporary British poets whose achievements have attracted considerable attention. Several of the poems in his second collection A Martian Sends a Postcard Home are first-rate, and the title poem supplied the name for what has come to be known as the "Martian" school in contemporary British poetry, of which Raine may be considered the initiator. The most striking feature of this kind of poetry is no doubt its imagery, to which the epithet "Martian" refers. In what follows I propose to discuss a few representative poems from the collection, focusing on this Martian element in the imagery and its effect on the poems as a whole.

It is no coincidence that the poem "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" has both given its name to the whole collection and is the first one printed in it. In many respects it constitutes the key to how to read the other poems, and can be said to exemplify its author's poetic conviction that

            images provide
    a kind of sustenance,
    alms for every beggared sense.
    ["Shallots," ll.16-18]

It seems to be a reasonable procedure, therefore, to scrutinize this poem first and subsequently examine other poems in the light of what has been discovered.

Once the reader has understood the implications of the poem's title and has overcome his initial puzzlement, he perceives that he is confronted with what in fact is a series of riddles. The Martian reports via interplanetary mail a number of earthly phenomena which to us, humans, are perfectly familiar, but which he, failing to understand their meaning, describes in a highly original, "poetic" way. It is our task as readers to "reconstruct" the phenomena the Martian describes by fusing our knowledge of the world with his perception of it. Or, to put it differently, Raine wants us to look at our already too familiar world with the unprejudiced eyes of a Martian in order to perceive it afresh. This, he implies, is exactly what a poet ought to do and, by extension, his readers. This notion of the poet's function to make his readers aware of the world is, of course, by no means new. In fact, Coleridge draws attention to a very similar idea when he explains Wordsworth's contributions to the Lyrical Ballads:

Mr. Wordsworth … was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural [Coleridge's realm], by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

(Biographia Literaria, Ch. 14)

Or, to quote [Victor] Shklovsky, a critic with a very different background, whose ideas are even more closely akin to Raine's:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar", to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

Being a Martian, then, is like drawing away the "film of familiarity" clouding objects, making them "unfamiliar", so that our sense of perception is fully restored.

In "A Martian" Shklovsky's "defamiliarization process" is exemplified in its purest form. Some ten earthly concepts are defamiliarized by being concealed in an alien's perception of them and the reader has to make a conscious mental effort to retrieve the Martian's innocent and flawed view of these concepts. There can be no doubt that Raine succeeds brilliantly in finding striking descriptions for these objects, but his predominant concern with creating surprising images has resulted in a poem which in other respects suffers from certain weaknesses. In the first place the reader needs to surrender to a considerable suspension of disbelief—to invoke another Coleridgean coinage. In order to be capable of making his observations at all, the Martian must have at his disposal a number of sublunary concepts. Consider, for instance, the poem's opening lines:

     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. (ll. 1-6)

Obviously the Martian must be familiar with, among other things, the notions of "mechanicalness", "quantity", "flying animal", "weeping", and of course be able to frame correct English sentences. Inevitably a degree of arbitrariness is involved on the poet's part in selecting the phenomena with which the Martian is acquainted, and those with which he is not. As this arbitrariness is inherent in the whole idea underlying the poem, however, the poet must be granted this freedom. Therefore, no sympathetic reader is likely to complain that the Martian uses words like "mechanical"(l.1), "machine" ("Mist is when the sky is tired of flight / and rests its soft machine on ground"—ll.7-8), "apparatus" ("In homes a haunted apparatus sleeps, / that snores when you pick it up."—ll.19-20), and even "television" ("Rain is when the earth is television"—l.11), but is, as ll.19-24 show, apparently unaware of the use of a telephone. Neither will anyone be seriously bothered to learn that the visitor from outer space marvels at "Model T", which is a "room with the lock inside" (l.13), while disregarding this oddity in the

              punishment room
     with water but nothing to eat.
     They lock the door and suffer the noises alone. (ll.26-29)

After all, the "punishment room" is also a "room with the lock inside".

It is a more serious matter, however, when this kind of irregularity takes a form which justifies the qualification "inconsistency". Thus, whereas the Martian needs six lines to explain his "caxtons" (l.1), he describes the world as "dim and bookish" (my italics) in l.9, and, moreover, in the final lines shows that he is familiar with the concept of reading:

      At night, when all the colours die,
      they hide in pairs
 
      and read about themselves—
      in colour, with their eyelids shut. (ll.31-34)

Similarly, while our Martian uses the circumlocution "when all the colours die" to indicate that it gets dark, he employs the verbal phrase "to make darker" in l.12. Finally, it is at least highly unlikely that the Martian would be mystified by the fact that at night humans "hide in pairs" (l.32), when he effortlessly uses concepts like "being tired" (l.7), "sleep" (ll.19 and 22) and "to wake up" (l.23). These inconsistencies suggest a lack of internal coherence in the poem; the poet has not consistently shown the world from the Martian's point of view. As the poet of all the other poems in the collection he could have used "when all the colours die" as another way of saying "when it gets dark"—and we would have admired the poeticality of the expression. But in this poem the narrator is not the poet—the "implied poet" if you wish—but a Martian, whose descriptions, by sheer coincidence, happen to be highly poetical.

The lack of internal coherence can be founded on yet another aspect of the poem: both its length and the order in which the "riddles" are presented, are completely arbitrary. Arguably, the last four lines, with their description of sleeping and dreaming, suggest a faint air of finality (the end of the day), but that would be as far as we can go. The other riddles (Clusters of ll.1-6; 7-10; 11-12; 13-16; 17-18; 19-24 and 25-30) could be read in any order. Furthermore, the poem could theoretically have been indefinitely extended, or alternatively shortened by one or two riddles without its "structure" suffering any serious damage.

It might sound a bit like splitting hairs to dwell so long on the poem's flaws. After all, the poem functions as a kind of prologue to all the poems that follow, which necessitates a clear, unmodified exemplification of the poet's artistic creed. Indeed, one could even consider the poem as a kind of manifesto—and that it has been taken as such is proved by the now widely used adjective "Martian". And as in a manifesto nobody expects carefully balanced stances, we can, as long as we consider the poem in isolation, wink at what, after all, are minor faults and let ourselves be carried away by its extraordinary imagery. A purely imagistic poem like this—titled in such a way as to collect all the images under one heading and bring the message home—should be taken in the same spirit as Pound's "In a Station of the Metro": "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough".

The main reason, then, why I have nonetheless chosen to go into such detail examining the implications of the imagery in this poem is that it provides us with some important touchstones for the analysis of the imagery in other poems in the collection and enables us to judge their relative merit.

There are several more poems which are very similar in pattern to "A Martian" in that they are predominantly strings of images with little connection between them, which gives them a very static character. All of these poems share the feature, though not all in the same degree, that they not only lack a neatly elaborated internal development, but also internal coherence. The first characteristic in itself, of course, can hardly count as an objection. As Morrison and Motion point out in the introduction to their anthology [Contemporary British Poetry (1982)]: "The new poetry is often open-ended, reluctant to point the moral of, or conclude too neatly, what it chooses to transcribe". But the second feature, the impaired internal coherence, is, as noted before, of a more dubious nature. Turning to "The Meteorological Lighthouse at O—" as a representative of the poems which are flawed in this respect, we are presented with a—presumably short—trip by speedboat to a lighthouse;

     The speedboat ducks and drakes
     through quiet seas to where
 
     the lighthouse stands
     like a salt cellar by Magritte,
 
     dwarfing the keeper
     who figure-eights our rope
 
     around the bleak iron bollards. (ll.1-7)

We might assume from l.17, "the whole place is homesick", and from the fact that the trip is made by boat, that the lighthouse is situated on an island. There the narrator is shown around by the keeper.

Arguably, the poem can be divided into several parts, very much like "A Martian". It is possible to distinguish five clusters—ll.1-12;13-22;23-27;28-34 and 35-38—with, however, only the weakest possible links between them. The second part is connected to the first only by the repetition of the word "keeper" and by a certain basic logico-temporal sequencing (one first sets off to an island and then arrives there, rather than vice versa). That Raine himself is aware of the weakness of the transition from the first to the second part is suggested by the dots in l.12 ("like an opened envelope …"), a device which he frequently employs and which, though occasionally it has a clear-cut function (e.g. "passage of time" and "tension" both in "In the Dark"), often seems merely to be used to mask an uneasy, insufficiently motivated, transition. Part three (ll.23-27) is joined to the preceding passage by the notion of "sleeping". Raine's use of the contrastive "but" in l.23, however, seems to be not quite justified, for with it he equates the content of the vehicle of a simile ("as if he'd fallen asleep / outdoors and only just woken"), that is, an element from the imagination of the narrator, with a direct quotation of the keeper ("But the lighthouse is insomniac / he says", ll.23-24—my italics). In other words, the keeper could never have used the word "but", because he cannot have been aware of a contrast in the first place. Despite the fact that the break between parts three and four occurs within one couplet, there is again no clear connection between them, except that the computer is one more phenomenon the keeper can show to his guest. The last lines, too, are open to the objection that they are not really worked into the texture of the whole poem:

     He shows me a garden
     through his telescope—
     wearing its greenhouse
     like an engagement ring (ll.35-38)

—although one could see in the mentioning of the garden (if it is on the mainland) a reinforcement of the idea of homesickness worked out in ll.17-22.

But still, a unifying imagery could have saved the poem. As in "A Martian", the poem abounds in original and striking images. However, instead of welding the poem into a whole, the images attract so much attention to themselves that they, on the contrary, emphasize its very fragmentariness. The images have been selected from completely different registers—games, surrealist painting, sleep, knitting, etc. Each image has been chosen because it vividly and originally evokes a certain situation, whereas no attempt has been made to have the images reinforce each other—as in for instance the poem "Floods", where the key theme "argument" knits the images together. Even in cases where a phenomenon arouses strong expectations as to its further development we are disappointed. Consider the following lines:

     One side of the keeper's face
     is so badly disfigured
 
     he looks at my feet
     when he talks about the lighthouse.
 
     The whole place is homesick—
     even his scalded cheek,
 
     with its pallid impression
     of ferns and grass
 
     as if he'd fallen asleep
     outdoors and only just woken.

Whereas at first we trust to be told more about the keeper's badly disfigured face, we find we are given no further information, and it is difficult to escape the feeling that this feature was mainly introduced to prepare for the comparison with the "pallid impression / of ferns and grass" as of one who has "fallen asleep / outdoors and only just woken". Admittedly there is some justification for this simile; after all the narrator sees even in the scalded cheek a sign of homesickness, suggesting that the "ferns and grass" are a token of home—but surely this link is too tenuous to warrant the use of such a heavily loaded feature as a badly disfigured face.

It seems imperative at this stage in the argument to investigate more closely the nature of Raine's imagery, in order to avoid the trap of criticizing the poet for what he did not try to achieve in the first place. Following [Geoffrey N.] Leech's terminology and definitions, we can conclude that Raine employs metaphor slightly more often than simile, the use of formal indicators ("like", "as if") between tenor and vehicle distinguishing the latter from the former. Although he concludes that each metaphor can be turned into a simile, Leech warns the reader to remain aware of their important differences. He emphasizes that a simile is generally more explicit than a metaphor and that, unlike metaphor, it can specify both the ground and the manner of comparison. It is the greater implicitness which accounts for

the tendency of metaphor to explain the more undifferentiated areas of human experience in terms of the more immediate. We make abstractions tangible by perceiving them in terms of the concrete, physical world; we grasp the nature of inanimate things more vividly by breathing life into them; the world of nature becomes more real to us when we project into it the qualities we recognize in ourselves.

It is illuminating to consider Raine's imagery in the light of the preceding remarks. If we return to the "manifesto" Martian poem we discover that its images exemplify neither metaphor, nor simile proper. On the one hand formal connectors are entirely absent—which points to metaphor—on the other hand we are in all cases supplied with manner and ground of comparison—characteristic of simile—and, in the last resort, none of the implicitness of metaphor survives. This oddity finds its origin in a very simple fact: in all cases tenor and vehicle are completely co-referential, identical. Thus, once the riddles have been solved, we are left with an entirely unambiguous rendering of tenor (= vehicle) and the ground of comparison. The fact that the "tenor" is initially unknown explains why (as in simile) the ground of comparison is always included—it is indispensable for construing the tenor. And due to the identity of tenor and vehicle the images lose every hint of the suggestiveness characteristic of metaphor. The result is a poem which through its very transparency precludes any further interest once it has been "reconstructed".

Raine's imagery, then, because of the identity of tenor and vehicle, has an even greater explicitness than that usually associated with simile. While this is particularly true of "A Martian", the same feature can be witnessed in "The Meteorological Lighthouse at O—", though admittedly to a less marked extent. The main difference is that in this last poem we are faced with real similes. However, the potential tension between tenor and vehicle hardly materializes because of two things. In the first place Raine mostly compares concrete, material things in terms of other concrete, material things. Secondly, in most cases the ground of comparison is restricted to only one element: the visual similarity. The speedboat ducking and draking; the taut ropes, "leaving the sea / like an opened envelope"; the computer output; they all evoke a vivid picture—nothing less, but certainly nothing more, either. It is this tenuousness of the link between tenor and vehicle, together with the already mentioned lack of coherence between parts within the poems under discussion which account for their rather static and shallow character.

The question we will have to face now is to what extent we may hold all this against Raine. After all, Raine, in most of the more "orthodox" Martian poems, has no intentions whatsoever of explaining "the more undifferentiated areas of human experience in terms of the more immediate". On the contrary, he wants to draw attention, as we have noted before, to the process of perception itself. Perceiving the familiar in terms of the unfamiliar is a joy in itself and need not lead to a greater (metaphysical) understanding of the world.

This, of course, is a legitimate view. Unfortunately, however, Raine's ideas about the importance of perception clash in a number of his poems with an essential poetic principle. As I have tried to demonstrate, the poet has only been able to indulge freely in imagery by sacrificing internal coherence and consistency. Both by the standards of a "traditionalist" critic like [Graham] Hough, who stresses the necessity of a work of art's "integrity—the almost universal requirement that the work shall be a whole, not a slice, a chunk, a collection or a heap", and by those of a well-known structuralist critic [Jonathan Culler]—"[a] fundamental convention of the lyric is what we might call the expectation of totality or coherence"—we therefore cannot but conclude that a number of the poems in the Martian collection are seriously flawed.

However, Raine has written some outstandingly good poems as well and I would like to end this exposé with a discussion of a poem in which the poet has successfully integrated his perceptive flair in an overall structure. "Laying a Lawn" is as full of imagery as any of the poems dealt with before, but in this case a unity has been achieved which makes it one of the best of the collection. Concentrating on the imagery as before, we notice how the grass chunks—books simile with which the poem opens, informs it throughout. We will therefore take it as the starting point for our analysis, then consider other elements, and come full circle again. Let us first take a closer look at these opening lines:

      I carry these crumbling tomes
      two at a time from the stack
 
      and lay them open on the ground.
      Bound with earth to last,
 
      they're like the wordless books
      my daughter lugs about unread
 
      or tramples underfoot. I stamp
      the simple text of grass
 
      with wood wormed brogues (ll.1-9)

Unlike many similes in other poems by Raine, this simile does not hinge on a single point of resemblance, but is a very rich one indeed. In the first place there is the physical similarity between the (probably rectangular) chunks of grass and the poet's daughter's books. Both are "laid open" on the ground; the grass chunks—carried two at a time, thus resembling a jacket and six "pages"—to form the lawn; the books (children's books, so probably with few pages, too) scattered around with a child's carelessness. The little girl's books are presumably of a firm quality as they are meant for children who are still to young to read ("wordless books", l.5—my italics). Similarly the grass "tomes"—a very felicitous choice of word—are heavy and meant to be relatively enduring; both books and grass chunks should be able to bear being trampled upon.

In the second place there are less tangible resemblances, where it should be noticed that meaning elements of tenor and vehicle magnificently interpenetrate on different levels. Whereas the books are "wordless", the chunks are "a simple text of grass" (l.8), but neither can be "read" in the literal sense of the word. Furthermore the two meanings of "brogue" (1. strong outdoor shoe; 2. dialectal accent) hint at significant interrelationships. The second meaning in the phrase "woodwormed brogues", when applied to "text", suggests the imperfectness of the earthly tomes, as does "crumbling" (l.1), a feature to which we will come back presently.

The blending of the connotations of the grass tomes and those of the books assume an added significance when juxtaposed to the father-daughter relationship. While the father is busily working with the grass chunks (which, as has been argued, are invested with the "book" connotations), the little girl is passively looking on. She is still innocent, not yet really involved with worldly things; she cannot yet be expected to help her father, just as she cannot yet be expected to be able to read books. Neither is she consciously aware of the fact that her doll is maimed, something which does not escape her father's notice. The idea of her innocence is further emphasized by her primeval nakedness. The father sees

     only the hair on her body
     like tiny scratches in gold,
 
     her little cunt's neat button-hole,
     and the navel's wrinkled pip … (ll.21-24)

The child's innocence, concentrated in her body's intactness, is linked to the grass chunks theme by the hint of decay which inheres in both: the grass tomes are crumbling and contain wood wormed brogues, while the girl will change teeth (l.15) and go through the full circle of life. But there is a more profound connection: the girl's decay will ultimately end in her death and she will be buried under the very "tomes" she is now playing on—she will become part of the earth again. "All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again" (Eccl.3.20). But for the moment the father refuses to think of all this. He is glad he "needn't see / the thin charcoal crucifix / her legs and buttocks make", ll.18-20. He suppresses thoughts of his daughter's future suffering—the black crucifix is a symbol that leaves no doubt as to its interpretation—and focuses on her innocence instead, marvelling at the perfection of her young body. The poem superbly culminates in its final lines:

       For the moment, our bodies
       are immortal in their ignorance—
 
       neither of us can read
       this Domesday Book. (ll.25-28)

If we read these lines in the light of what has become clear so far, it does not seem to be too fanciful to establish one other connection between the books and the earth, one which fuses the poem into a brilliant whole. For there is more to "reading the Domesday Book" than a witty joke. Not only does the Domesday Book refer back to the detailed survey King William I had drawn up, for tax purposes, of the precise state of England's lands and cattle; an Old English poem of that title, "Doomsday", has invariably been equated with the Day of Judgment, too. Once we have assessed these connotations, I think we are fully justified to be reminded of the medieval notion of the two books God bestowed on man: the Holy Book and the Book of Nature. The already mentioned themes of innocence versus experience, the transience and decay of human life, visions of suffering and the implications of the complex grass tomes simile resolve themselves in this aspect of medieval epistemology. Thus, whereas the father can "read" in the literal sense, which reflects his experience of life and suffering and his knowledge of the inevitability of decay and death, his daughter, who cannot read, is still blissfully unaware of all this—which constitutes her innocence. But neither the father nor his daughter can read "the Book of Nature" and in this respect the father is innocent, too. Focusing on this part of the innocence which he shares with his daughter, the father "for the moment" stops Time's wingèd chariot with its decay and death and completely identifies with her, feeling "immortal in [his] ignorance".

I hope the above analysis has convincingly shown that, unlike in the other poems discussed, the imagery in "Laying a Lawn" is not the result of a loose jumble of brilliant but unconnected perceptions, but the red thread welding the poem into a harmonious whole. The central simile is an incredibly rich one: instead of a single point of visual resemblance between tenor and vehicle, areas of comparison abound and trigger off an ever-extending degree of interpenetration of meaning-elements between them. The result is the ideal combination of maximum tension balancing maximum similarity characteristic of the best imagery. The images which are not directly dependent upon the earth-books simile—for example "the caterpillar, rucked like a curtain" and the "little cunt's neat button-hole"—are not overly conspicuous and are consistent with the dominant themes in the poem.

We already noted that the categories of figurative language do not always hold very precisely in Raine's poetry, so we are hardly surprised to find that the richness of the central simile gives it a very metaphorlike quality. Although many similarities between tenor and vehicle can be made explicit, the horizon keeps receding and new vistas come into view. Notwithstanding the fact that here, as in other poems, Raine compares two concrete things, each has such a vast range of connotations that none of the shallowness, characteristic of his weaker similes, results. Moreover, it is worth noticing that in none of the other poems does Raine so closely approach symbolism. In view of these observations, then, I would like to venture the idea that it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that the imagery in this splendid poem is not so much a celebration of sheer perception, as indeed an exploration into "the more undifferentiated areas of human experience in terms of the more concrete world".