Written in 1976, the imagery is very much from the view of the solar system imagined by the science fiction writers of the so called “Golden Age.”

Even in 1976, the extent of the atmosphere of Mars would obviously never have supported life in the open, and science fiction might write about colonies in domes or underground, but the poem is in the fantasy realm of Edgar Rice Burroughs, not that of Arthur C. Clarke. 

Nor would rain be falling on Venus, at least not liquid water - as early as 1962, Mariner 2 had put the temperature well above its boiling point., and the Venera series of probes showed pressures exceeding 75 atmospheres and temperatures about 460℃, with clouds of sulphuric and phosphoric acid. Any rain that falls is not going to contain water, and were there to be seas, they could possibly be seas of lead (~327℃, although probably not under that sort of pressure.)

Mercury appears to be not quite tidally locked as was originally thought - a Mercury day lasts approximately 2 Mercury years (about 88 days each)

Neptune has the hurricanes (as do all the gas giants), but pressure and temperature extremes are even worse than I made up. Chance of living on the "surface" at the core requires a "deus ex machina" plot. Author Hal Clement wrote an interesting book called Mission Of Gravity in 1953, although his planet Meskin was wildly erratic - it was highly oblate because of its massive rotational velocity - a "day" took just 18 minutes, and as a consequence, the gravity was about 300g at the poles but only 3g at the equator. And as for Pluto, it's not even considered a planet any more, and would be too small to have a sea as the gravitational pull is minute. Mars is about 0.37g; Pluto is only about 0.6g.

Now if you want to criticise my poetry, go ahead. if the scansion is not quite perfect, you don't like the imagery or what I've written, that's up to you. Just don't criticise the science, because there was never much there. It's science FICTION and poor stuff at that - hence it being in the "Strange Lands And Fantasy Section!

The other influence is clearly Gustav Holst’s “The Planets.” There the images are of a mythological and astrological nature, but the concept of a suite of music based on the planets picked out the title, even though the Sun in this title is there only by its influence and incidental mention.

There is no poem for the sun, because everything is about the sun. We live on the verge of an enormous gravity well, and live at its pleasure - a variation of a few percent of its output would destroy life on earth. And if we insist on making our planet a carbon dioxide sink trap, then a cautionary tale might look at Venus as an anti-role model.

---

From the start, this was conceived as a highly structured set of poems. The structure was the strictest version of the Italian (Petrachan) sonnet form. Structure consists of 2 sets of 4 lines, rhymed A-B-B-A A-B-B-A and you shouldn't carry sentences across that break after line 4. After 8 lines, you have a different logic - think of the 8 lines as the proposition and the subsequent 6 as the proof. 

Again, the second section is broken, into 2 groups of 3 lines, rhyming C-D-E C-D-E, with no flows across the break. I didn't quite make it when I originally wrote the series. Poems 1-3 and 7-9 have the correct rhyme scheme, but poems 4-6 use the Wordsworth variation of the last 6 lines C-D-C-D-C-D. It does at leat have a certain symmetry.

I managed the line 4/5 break consistently through the whole series, along with the change between the octet and the sextet. While I managed the 11/12 break in poems 1-3, and 8-9, the rhyme scheme in the Wordsworth variation works against it, and I didn't manage no. 7 either. All that will show in the originals. I will do my best to fix all this on the edits.

The final stricture is for the verse to be iambic pentameter. I managed this fairly well, but there was the odd word here and there that didn't quite make it. Iambic pentameter is not a defining point in a sonnet, but it is extremely common. So if I can fix it I will, but not at the expense of the other parts of the structure. I was pleased at the time that I could manage to get as close as I could, over 9 linked poems.