Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
An unnamed Martian visiting Earth sending a letter back home informing someone of his discoveries about life on earth.
Form and Meter
Rhymeless free verse with no regular meter.
Metaphors and Similes
A bathroom is described using metaphor: “Adults go to a punishment room / With water but nothing to eat”
Alliteration and Assonance
Alliteration: “But time is tied to the wrist”
Irony
The opening line refers to books by the name of the first person to print books in the English language. Ironically, he knows this rather obscure bit of history, but not that “Caxtons” are universally known as book.
Genre
Epistolary poem which takes the form of a type of correspondence, such as a letter or tourist postcard.
Setting
The setting is essential as the entire poem describes extremely common 20th century products found across the planet earth from the perspective of an alien visiting from the planet Mars.
Tone
Satirically ironic.
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: The unique perspective offered by outside points of view. Antagonist: Unimaginative perceptual abilities.
Major Conflict
The conflict at the heart of the poem is the divergence between how the Martian views everyday items used by human begins.
Climax
The poem climaxes with a description of the end of the day when humans going to sleep and dream which he describes as reading stories about themselves.
Foreshadowing
The opening line in which books are called “Caxtons” and described as “mechanical birds with many wings” foreshadows how the perspective of the Martian toward everyday items will be unique and idiosyncratic.
Understatement
“Only the young are allowed to suffer / Openly” is an understated implication of the lack of autonomy endured by children in comparison to adults.
Allusions
“In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps” begins a three-stanza section in which the purposely ambiguous language can be interpreted as alluding to a baby, a telephone or both.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
The very first mass-produced automobile called the Model-T becomes a metonym meant to comprehensively describe every sort of automobile.
Personification
The “haunted apparatus” example mentioned above can be considered an example of personification in which the telephone is given the attributes of a human baby.
Hyperbole
The extended metaphorical description of the bathroom as a prison is hyperbolic overstatement.
Onomatopoeia
N/A
