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.
The first poetry in Star Trek was about a “bird” and a plane
Poetry and Star Trek have gone together since almost the very beginning.
There’s no poetry in “The Cage,” unless you count Dr. Boyce’s philosophical musings about doctors’ and bartenders’ two kinds of customers.
But in the original series’ second pilot episode, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Gary Mitchell (played by Gary Lockwood) demonstrates his new, uncanny power of recall by reciting the first few lines of a random page from a random data tape selected by Dr. Elizabeth Dehner (Sally Kellerman).
"My love has wings, slender feathered things With grace in upswept curve and tapered tip."
Mitchell identifies the lines as coming from “Nightingale Woman,” “written by Tarbolde on the Canopus Planet back in 1996.” Mitchell calls it “one of the most passionate love sonnets of the past couple of centuries.”
Now, Gary Mitchell may not be the most objective poetry critic! He immediately uses his recitation as an opening to manhandle “our good-looking lady doctor,” as he calls her, in the scene above.
From a mere 15-word sample, it’s hard to judge for ourselves whether Tarbolde’s poem deserves praise an erotic magnum opus. The fragment we have fits the classic Shakespearean sonnet form: Each line has five beats, the first line with nine syllables rather than the usual ten.
In actuality, the lines come from verses written by none other than the Great Bird of the Galaxy, Gene Roddenberry, about a B-17 Flying Fortress he flew during World War II.
We can only wonder what particular moments in flight inspired Roddenberry to deepen their meaning through poetry. Despite some fans’ memories and best efforts, Roddenberry’s complete text remains unknown.
(Would-be literature PhDs, there’s your thesis research assignment!)
“Nightingale Woman” also showed up in set decorations on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, according to the Memory Alpha wiki. You can spot a poster advertising Phineas Tarbolde and the Nightingale Women near the door to the Harlem night club in “Far Beyond the Stars.” And you’ll see the poem’s first line right under Rita Hayworth’s picture in the wall calendar at the Roswell Air Force base in “Little Green Men.”
“Very nice, Mr. Ears” – poetry in Star Trek can mean trouble
The connection between poetry and psychic powers persisted in Star Trek: The Original Series.
In the first season’s “Charlie X,” Charlie (Robert Walker, Jr.) makes Mr. Spock recite three snatches of poetry—one of the many ways the troubled and terrifyingly powerful teen asserts his control over the Enterprise and its crew.
Spock is first forced to declaim the first two lines of “The Tyger” from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794). Later, he croaks the first line of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe (1845).
In between, Spock spits out this quick, Sol system-themed couplet: “Saturn rings around my head / Down a road that’s Martian red.” Leonard Nimoy’s choice to sharply turn his head and glare at Charlie as the final word is forced from him is dramatic and effective.
Whether this text is some 23rd-century nursery rhyme or an Ogden Nash-like nonsense poem, we don’t know. Written for the episode, the couplet was, in the final draft script, a quatrain (also per Memory Alpha):
"Saturn’s rings upon my finger Vulcan’s helmet on my head. Jupiter’s chariot ‘neath my feet Down the road that’s Martian red."
I like the longer version for its mythological associations. But Charlie’s not about letting us have nice things!
In the third season’s “Plato’s Stepchildren,” we hear even more psychically induced poetry.
The sadistic Platonians not only force Spock to sing “Maiden Wine”—written by Nimoy and included on his 1968 album The Touch of Leonard Nimoy—but also get a command performance of some doggerel and dance from Spock and Kirk.
Their little ditty isn’t from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871), but sounds like it could be. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are characters in the book, and Kirk and Spock’s words include some wonderfully weird nonsense from its “Jabberwocky” poem.
Data lets his love for his cat out of the bag
In the teaser of the sixth season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Schisms,” Data entertains (if that is the word) an audience of his shipmates in Ten Forward with a carefully constructed, emotionally lifeless, inadvertently hilarious tribute to his pet cat.
Data is correct: The ode is a venerable poetic tradition.
Odes date back to ancient Greece, when poets composed them to praise the winners of athletic competitions.
During the Romantic era of English literature, such poets as John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge composed odes that were more personal in nature, expressing insights they received from the natural world or intense emotional experiences.
But despite Data’s best efforts, his “Ode to Spot” simply misses the mark.
As Geordi later tells him, Data’s verse was “a tribute to form” but didn’t “evoke an emotional response”—unless Riker’s “anticipation of [Data’s] denouement” counts!
According to The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion by Larry Nemecek, staff writer Brannon Braga hoped “Data’s bad poetry” would recur frequently in the series (p. 221).
It didn’t, but “Ode to Spot” had an encore of sorts in the episode “A Fistful of Datas,” when Riker’s PADD accesses it instead of the play he and Dr. Crusher are rehearsing.
Even though Data’s efforts wouldn’t land him the post of Starfleet poet laureate, his recitation of “Ode to Spot” remains a favorite scene among TNG fans.
Maybe it makes us feel better to know even Data, superior to humans in so many ways, has growing edges to work on. Or maybe it reminds us it’s always worth the effort to communicate love for our friends.
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.
Picard pleads humanity’s case using the Bard of Avon’s words
When talking about poetry in Star Trek, we can’t ignore the numerous ways the works and words of William Shakespeare resound throughout the franchise.
From the Karidian Players’ interrupted production of Hamlet aboard the Enterprise in “The Conscience of the King” to Star Trek: Discovery episode titles (such as “Such Sweet Sorrow”) drawn from his plays, Shakespeare’s spirit hovers like a muse of fire over the Star Trek future.
The late literary critic Harold Bloom claimed Shakespeare’s plays were “the outward limit of human achievement,” even that the Bard invented human character as we understand it: “no one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.”
One suspects Jean-Luc Picard might agree.
His impassioned recitation of Hamlet’s speech about human nature transforms lines which are, as Picard notes, cynical in original context into a paean praising the species and its potential:
"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! —Hamlet, II.2"
As Picard frames the passage, Shakespeare may as well have been penning the Star Trek vision statement. As long as the franchise’s aspirational and inspiring view of who humans are and what we may become continues, its gleanings from the Shakespearean canon will likely continue, too.
After all, the “Star Trek Universe” ad Paramount+ aired during this year’s Super Bowl began by reframing (and slightly altering) yet another quote from Shakespeare: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on …” (The Tempest, IV.1)
Across all its iterations, Star Trek assures us the human adventure is just beginning.
But poetry in Star Trek will never end, bringing deeper meaning to moment after memorable moment.
What’s your favorite occurrence of poetry in Star Trek? Let us know on Twitter, on Facebook, or in the comments!