Whether you welcome April and “his showers sweet,” as Chaucer did, or lament it as what T.S. Eliot called “the cruellest month,” it is National Poetry Month. Did you think we happy band of fans would let this month slip by without celebrating poetry in Star Trek? We must, above all, to our own selves be true!
Poetry appears in Star Trek more than you might think. And why shouldn’t it? The franchise has always attracted a talented breed of well-read writers who understand poetry’s power.
I asked Ernest Hilbert—a highly acclaimed poet, librettist, and critic whose most recent collection of verse is Last One Out—to comment on poetry in Star Trek. He seemed to think the pairing only logical.
Like novelists and historians, Hilbert explains, TV and film writers use poetry
"to provide a reflective pause, to enrich the surrounding settings with beautiful and memorable language, and to transcend the pure action and plot of the moment. In short, poetry brings deeper meaning to the moment."
One poem Star Trek has turned to twice to add “deeper meaning to the moment” is “Sea-Fever” (1902) by British poet laureate John Masefield. Yearning for a wind-swept and wave-tossed life on the oceans, the poem’s speaker asks only “for a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”
In both “The Ultimate Computer” (as he faces the prospect of losing his command to the M-5 artificial intelligence) and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (as he returns to the NCC-701-A), Captain Kirk christens the Enterprise his “tall ship.”
Not all poetry in Star Trek captures its soul of wonder and adventure quite as well as Masefield’s words do.
But, as we’ll see, all poetry in Star Trek makes for memorable moments.