I’ve been trying to annotate a poem by the Welsh poet Lynette Roberts for an anthology, & it’s down to the wire… Have managed to sort out all of the queries but one for the selection. It’s from a very difficult poem, Gods with Stainless Ears, & I thought I’d paste in the first two stanzas to give a little context for the query. The poem is set during WW2, & the heroine, deserted by her airplane-pilot lover, has just had a miscarriage:
I, rimmeled, awake before the dressing sun:
Alone I, pent up incinerator, serf of satellite gloom
Cower around my cradled self; find crape-plume
In a work-basket cast into swaddling clothes
Forcipated from my mind after the foetal fall:
Rising ashly, challenge blood to curb–compose–
Martial mortal, face a red mourning alone.
To the star of the third magnitude O my God,
Shriek, sear my swollen breasts, send succour
To sift and settle me.
OK: the question is: what is the “star of the third magnitude”? The best guess I’ve come across is that it might hook up to “Martial mortal”–i.e. might be the planet Mars (perhaps identified with the missing fighter-lover?). Would Mars be of the 3rd magnitude (in the technical sense of brightness not size, I assume…)? – One editor I consulted says it’s Venus, the morning star, as it’s 2nd planet from the sun (I guess he’s counting the sun)…I think he’s grasping at straws. Or does Roberts just mean “any distant star”?
OK, it’s a hopelessly arcane question (& an arcane poem…though actually I like the poem a lot). But I could use some help here. --N
If it is arcane…is it particularly learned? She might be making use of the Phainomena of Aratus, an important Greek didactic poem about astronony. Although it is a rather bad poem by modern standards, the ancients loved it. Most people in learned literary tradition who incorporate astronomy into poetry have at least some experience with Aratus.
Re: Aratus–Hm…yes, Roberts was well-read, if idiosyncratically so–I don’t know if she knew Greek (though I assume a translation was available). (She was quite learned about Welsh, in fact supplying Graves with Celtic material for The White Goddess, though she eventually told him she thought his book was completely wrong.) My understanding is that the ancient astronomers divided up stars into 6 arbitrary classes of magnitude (the present logarithmic system only having been developed in the 19th century), so I’ll try & see what Aratus said–maybe, who knows, Mars is listed in class 3. – But on the whole Roberts’ work makes much use of contemporary (often scientific) idiom, & I’d much more expect her to be using the term “magnitude” in the current scientific sense. --N
Mars is first magnitude, as is the star Antares (rival of Mars) in Scorpius, which is often mistaken for Mars. Both are red, however, which would also fit the previous line. Are you sure it’s “third” and not “first”? I’m hard-pressed to think of any poetically-significant third magnitude stars.
You are right that the ancient astronomers, starting with Hipparchus, divided stars into 6 caterogies, first-degree being brightest and sixth-degree being dimmest. The categories were not exactly arbitrary, but pretty closely follow a logrithmic scale, each higher degree representing roughly a two-and-a-half-fold reduction in the amount of light reaching us. The modern logrithmic scale is based on the ancient scale.
Mars and Venus can’t be classified as third-degree stars under either system; They are both too bright. I don’t know if the ancients even applied the system to planets, since the brightness of the planets varies depending on distance. If they did apply it to planets, Mars and Venus would probably be classed as first-degree stars. On the modern scale, the brightness of Mars varies from +1.6 (when it appears dimmest) to -3.0 (when it appears brightest) according to this site Even at its dimmest, Mars is one of the 25 or so brightest objects in the night sky, out of several thousand visible stars.
My guess is that magnitude in the poem has nothing to do with our astronomical idea of magnitude. It simply wouldn’t make sense. It would have the same effect as:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and thine temper is 17 degrees cooler.
Winds of 20 miles per hour doth shake the darling buds of May…”
And so forth. Such technical measurements should not, I’d think, have much ease fitting in with the stanzas you’ve given us, ndorward.
My guess is magnitude here means “importance.” But guessing which star is third most important to this poor woman… ack. I can’t even try. I wish I could help ya. Anyone else wish to take a shot?
Useful to know that Mars can’t be right–this means I can in good conscience in the gloss to the line just say the star is unidentified, assuming Roberts even has a particular one in mind.
I liked this parody a lot:
–which actually isn’t so very far from some of the modernist uses of arcane vocabulary & jargon in the poems I’ve been dealing with. I suppose a good instance would be Roberts’ near-contemporary, the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid–“On a Raised Beach” for example:
All is lithogenesis–or lochia,
Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,
Stones black than any in the Caaba,
Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces,
Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,
Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform…
(edited for brevity. Trust me, folks, it doesn’t get any more comprehensible. --Chronos)
& a similar arcaneness & hyperexactitude of diction is typical of David Jones. Or one might cite the contemporary poet J.H. Prynne, especially his book Wound Response. – Anyway, this is all by the by, as it looks like my question is answered, albeit in the negative. Thanks. --N
It’s impossible to say what, exactly, the author meant, of course, but a phrase like “star of the third magnitude” almost has to be a reference, however indirect, to the magnitude system used to rate the brightness of stars. It’s not ludicrous, either: I once wrote a poem in tribute to my dog Bear (rest his soul), in which I referred to “Brightest in the sky” (Sirius, the Dog Star, is the brightest star other than the Sun). Of course, I am an astronomer…
Hey, I just heard a bell go off. “-3.0”? What’s a negative sign or two?
Weirdly, too, that site says that the favorable oppositions, where Mars can actually get that bright, come at 15 or 17 year periods, which would have meant that there would have been one sometime during world war II.
O, nevermind. I see that that’s a favorable opposition–but I think the earlier ones are the ones where Mars gets up to nearly -3.0 magnitude. I don’t think Mars would have got above -2.0 in 1943.
but it does seem to make some sort of sense to me.
Might not the ‘star of the third magnitude’ refer to the heroine herself? Note the two-and-a-half lines following, where she seems to be seeking a little solace from God.
A star of the third magnitude is one, as bibliophage pointed out, one that’s both fairly common and not really noticeable or significant in any way to the layman. Only someone who knows what he’s looking for (say, an amateur astronomer) or someone to whom a given 3rd magnitude star is pointed out for some reason would have any occasion to notice it and know it’s there.
Such is the case with our heroine in the poem. The star of the first magnitude would be the infant she has just lost, whose soul presumably is winging its way to the afterlife and requires much divine attention. The star of the second magnitude is the pilot/lover, who is off fighting a war and certainly needs looking after in order to come home safely. The star of the third magnitude would be the heroine, who has lost two people close to her and obviously isn’t high on the priority list for Looking After, either in the category of mortal danger or someone whom God has decided to bless with happy events. So this ‘star of the third magnitude’ in the heavens is making herself known to the Universe.
To non-city dwellers (especially during WWII days when there was less light pollution), third magnitude stars can play a noticeable part in the outlines of constellations. IIRC, the stars of Orion’s head, for example, are 3rd magnitude.
Anyway, without seeing the whole poem, I don’t think the poet was directly referring to the actual astronomy magnitude system. She was probably using those words to complement the other astronomical terms used (sun, satellite) as an analogy/metaphor like Olentzero mentioned.
There are two kinds of magnitude now used: absolute and relative. Perhaps she is speaking of a third kind of magnitude–combined with the remainder of the line, a divine magnitude. Whether this helps or not, I cannot say.
Perhaps she speaks of the order of magnitude of the persons in her life, with herself first, her lover second (or vice versa), and the lost, obscure child third.
Or perhaps she means that her former lover is now no more than an ordinary star in the constellation of her life.
The lover could be a third magnitude warrior in terms of the rest of the world, but known to her, as one may have a certain star, not otherwise exceptional, to which one has an emotional attachment.
None of these can be justified by the text posted alone, but maybe the author of the post, who has the complete poem (which I do not) may find them useful.
Hm, some good guesses here, though I’m not sure how one might clinch the identifications–I like the guess that maybe it’s actually “star of the negative third magnitude”, which might permit the i.d. of Mars still (the poem was written 1941-43 so indeed would be at the period of -3 magnitude), & the guess about Alcyone.
A couple of notes on the passage I quoted: it’s grammatically very ambiguous, indeed painfully fragmented (appropriate, I suppose, given that it’s the most painful moment in the poem)–in the final sentence quoted I think “God” is the subject, with a triple predicate (i.e. the syntax “should” run, without inversion: “O my God, shriek to the star of the third magnitude; sear my swollen breasts; send succour”). Also: a couple of the obscurer words: “rimmeled” derives, I think, from the cosmetics manufacturer Rimmel & thus (with a pun on “rim”) means her eyes are ringed as if with black makeup from weeping. “Forcipated” according to the OED means forceps-shaped but here obviously means “removed with forceps”.
Sadly, the poem isn’t going to be easily available to the average Straight Doper (at least until the anthology I’m working on is published: it will have the last two sections)–Roberts in the 1950s underwent a conversion & became a Jehovah’s Witness, repudiating her verse–she prevented its reprinting up till her death in 1995, & after her death an edition was edited & printed by Seren Books, only for some relative of hers to take offence at the introduction & get a court order to suppress the book. A strange career, especially for one that started out promisingly (her two books of poems were published by Eliot at Faber).
I should have commented that the reference to Alcyone came from Websters Dictionary (1913 edition) so would have been available (presumably) to the poet.