Focusing upon both 'structure' and 'function' produce a critical analysis of Craig Raine's poem 'A Martian Sends A Postcard Home'

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BEN MURRAY ENL 061

“ Focusing upon both ‘structure’ and ‘function’ produce a critical analysis of Craig Raine’s poem ‘A Martian Sends A Postcard Home’”

Perhaps the most important feature of Craig Raine’s 1979 poem ‘A Martian Sends A Postcard Home’ is that is uses an alien voice as its persona, when writing a poet may use their own voice, someone else’s voice or indeed have a multi-voiced persona as a tool of reaching, challenging and pleasing their audience. It is a very useful tool as this poet shows.

 Raine’s piece is directed by a keenly observant, intelligent (if not always intelligible), disengaged tone. Using this foreign voice Raine can intrigue the reader by making conventional objects seem unusual. One example would be:

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‘Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on ground’

From this quote the audience can acknowledge that this visitor has appreciated the natural beauty and mystique of clouds and mist, but can only equate the phenomenon it mechanical terms. Throughout the piece Raine uses a range of audacious figurative language as his tools to give the poem an air of defamiliarisation, as well as trying to bring the reader into the poem (the very essence of it being an observational poem creates the platform for the reader to develop their own ...

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