@ Brendan: Thank you such an interesting elaboration on the poem! I’m not sure you will entirely agree with me, but I’ve long suspected that our genes account for much more of our behavior than we typically credit them with. That doesn’t mean I’m a genetic determinist — I think other things play a role too. But I believe the role of genes in behavior is only now beginning to be understood.

It feels like watching a film with the audio description on… for someone quite capable of hearing the sounds on their own.

The poem says what it needs to say very eloquently – having read it I have thought about human nature in a way that is somehow diminished by hearing the poem described as “one answer to the question, “what is human nature?”

But I don’t wish to discourage you from critiquing poems because I am always interested in other people’s reactions to artforms. I think some of the interest of that dynamic is in looking at someone else’s work and how you react.

For me one interesting way of critiquing a poem, or at least, enhancing someone’s experience of that poem, is to ask the reader questions that encourage them to look more deeply and find answers to themselves.

So here, this might mean asking “Where is that “somewhere”? What does it mean to the writer? What is the modern image of the rocket doing alongside the older archetypal roles?

There’s a lovely discussion in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle where someone is trying to describe, to the author, the effect that reading his postmodernist book had on him. He’s unable to do it, and apologises. The author laughs and says that if someone else had been able to describe the effect he had been trying to achieve on his readers in a few words, he wouldn’t have needed to go to the trouble of writing a whole book about it.