Poetry in Star Trek to energize your National Poetry Month
By Mike Poteet
The Voyager EMH fights the good fight in an epic poem
The first season Star Trek: Voyager episode “Heroes and Demons” doesn’t contain any poetry per se. Rather, writer Naren Shankar’s script (his only Voyager writing credit, according to Keith R.A. DeCandido) is largely contained within poetry—or at least a “holonovel” based on Beowulf.
Early in the episode, Chakotay succinctly sums up Beowulf as “an ancient English epic, set in sixth century Denmark … Monsters and swordplay, that sort of thing.”
The importance of Beowulf to English and Danish literature is hard to overstate.
As the oldest extant poem in Old English—and surviving in only one manuscript, at that—it offers invaluable insights into Anglo-Saxon material culture, social structure, and language.
But as J.R.R. Tolkien recognized and passionately argued in his milestone 1936 lecture “The Monsters and the Critics,” Beowulf matters for its essential character as a solemn reflection on mortality. Its monsters—not only Grendel but also Grendel’s mother and, in Beowulf’s old age, a dragon—represent the inevitably of death.
“Heroes and Demons” preserves the poem’s exciting “monsters and swordplay”—as the scene above illustrates (ably assisted by Dennis McCarthy’s valiant musical score)—but also its essential elegiac quality.
The Emergency Medical Hologram, still trying out various names for himself in these early Delta Quadrant days, has settled on “Schweitzer,” in honor of medical missionary Dr. Albert Schweitzer.
But he doesn’t keep this name after he defeats Voyager’s “monsters,” because Freya (Marjorie Susan Monaghan), the holographic warrior princess whom he loved, died happily with the name “Schweitzer” on her lips.
This episode thrilled me. Yes, I was an English major in college, so it pressed those buttons. But it also made me care about the Doctor as a character for the first time. His adventures would continue, even as Freya’s, hologram though she always was, would not. As Tolkien wrote about the poem, “life is transitory: light and life together hasten away.”
“Heroes and Demons” one of the most beautiful and poetic stories Star Trek: Voyager offered.