1
National Poetry Day postcards, Scotland 2012
teachers’ notes
Iain Crichton Smith, Toward the Stars
THE POET AND HIS WORK
Iain Crichton Smith was born in 1928 in Glasgow, and raised by his widowed mother on the Isle of
Lewis. Educated at the University of Aberdeen, after national service he became a secondary school
teacher in Clydebank, and then in Oban. In 1977 he resigned to write full time. He received many
awards, including the OBE in 1980. He died in 1998. A prolific writer, he wrote poems and prose in both
Gaelic and English, including a book of poems for children, River, River (1978).
THE POEM
’Towards the Stars’, together with four other poems by Iain Crichton Smith, was published in (and
possibly written specially for) Spaceways: an anthology of space poetry, edited by John Foster (OUP,
1986). The poem is not included in the Collected Poems (1990 / 2011), but is reproduced on NPD2012
postcards and poster pdfs by permission of the poet’s Estate.
READING THE POEM – NOTES & QUESTIONS

How many stanzas (verses) does the poem have?

How many lines does each stanza have?

Each stanza ends in a full stop – except one which ends with a comma. Which one? And why do
you think this is?

Are there any rhymes in the poem?
The poem doesn’t tell us much about who ‘they’ are, or how they are travelling.

How would you describe the people going “towards the stars”?

What do we learn about their spaceship?

Why do they need to sleep in “refrigerated beds”?

Why do they spend the whole journey asleep?

How is their sleep different from normal sleep? Why do you think this might be?
National Poetry Day Scotland & loads more ideas for working with poetry
www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/learn
2

How do you think they know when to wake up?
National Poetry Day Scotland & loads more ideas for working with poetry
www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/learn
3
When we look at the stars from the earth, they move around us.

Why in the poem do the stars “[watch] without moving”?
Think about the way time is described in the poem.

What time of day, and time of year, is it in stanza five?

Why do you think the poet has chosen these for the wakening-up time?

How can they be “still young… / after a hundred years”?
DISCUSSION
This is poem set in the future, when humans can travel deeper into space than is currently possible.
But the idea of sleeping for a hundred years is an old one, and features in such fairy tales as ‘Sleeping
Beauty’, or in the film Brigadoon.

Imagine you meet someone today who has been asleep for a hundred years. Think about what
the world was like a hundred years ago, in 1912 – there were cars, and telephones, and films,
and planes, but all less developed than they are now. What do you think would seem most
strange to them about our world? What do you think they would most like – and most dislike?

Imagine you fall asleep, and wake up in 2112. What do you think will have changed in the
world? And what will have stayed the same?
RESEARCH
Find out about real journeys people have taken into space, such as

the first cosmonauts

the astronauts’ moon landings

the space shuttle

the space station, Mir
Find out about unmanned space probes which have been launched from Earth, such as

the Mars Exploration Rovers

Voyager 1

Cassini
National Poetry Day Scotland & loads more ideas for working with poetry
www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/learn
4
CREATIVE ACTIVITY
Describe your own spaceship, its crew and its voyage through space.
Think about

the shape of your spacecraft

its size

what it’s made from

its colours

whether it has any words, images or patterns on its outside

the sound it makes as it takes off, flies and lands

what sort of equipment it carries inside

how many people are on board, and what their jobs are (assuming they’re not sleeping all the
time!)

where it’s travelling to

what the people on board plan to do when they arrive

how they feel about leaving their own planet and travelling through space
Now write your poem, using some of your notes.

Use short stanzas, like ‘Towards the Stars’ – just two, or perhaps three, lines.

Put a full-stop at the end of each stanza.

Keep the poem quite short – say, six to eight stanzas – so you have to think carefully about
what you include in it.
FURTHER READING & LINKS
Books by Iain Crichton Smith
Consider the Lilies (1968)
River, River (1974)
Towards the Human: Selected Essays (1986)
The Red Door: The Complete English Short Stories, 1949-76 (Birlinn, 2002)
The Black Halo: The Complete English Short Stories, 1977-98 (Birlinn, 2002)
National Poetry Day Scotland & loads more ideas for working with poetry
www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/learn
5
New Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2011)
Other books
Spaceways: an anthology of space poetry, edited by John Foster (OUP, 1986)
Websites
www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/iain-crichton-smith
SPL page on Iain Crichton Smith
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/
‘Voyager, The Interstellar Mission’
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
‘Cassini, Solstice Mission’
***
Ken Cockburn
www.kencockburn.co.uk
July 2012
National Poetry Day Scotland & loads more ideas for working with poetry
www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/learn