Starre

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loobyloo - 25 Apr 2004 11:48 GMT

Does anyone know what a starre is? It's not on dictionary.com and not
in Chambers.

The context is this verse from Barry MacSweeney, (1945 - 2000), an
English poet whose Selected Poems have just been published and
reviewed in the TLS in December.

The light of recovery is an ex-starre, furious
with everlasting darkness.
I am the addict, strapping on his monumental thirst.
The sky is livid like jigsawed lace
and there are no happy endings

(from "Free Pet with Every Cage")

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Einde O'Callaghan - 25 Apr 2004 12:42 GMT

> Does anyone know what a starre is? It's not on dictionary.com and not
> in Chambers.
[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]
>
> (from "Free Pet with Every Cage")

Perhaps it's a variant spelling of "star" That would seem to fit the
context.

Regards, Einde O'Callaghan

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Mike Bandy - 25 Apr 2004 23:19 GMT

>> Does anyone know what a starre is? It's not on dictionary.com and not
>> in Chambers.
[quoted text clipped - 13 lines]
>Perhaps it's a variant spelling of "star" That would seem to fit the
>context.

The same spelling occurs in a seventeenth poem called Song by
John Donne. It can be found at
http://www.bartleby.com/105/2.html. It begins as follows:

GOE, and catche a falling starre,
Get with child a mandrake roote,
Tell me, where all past yeares are,
Or who cleft the Divels foot,

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Mike Bandy

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loobyloo - 26 Apr 2004 12:06 GMT

Mike Bandy <MikeBandy47@hotmail.com> - a made-up name if ever I've
heard one - said

>>Perhaps it's a variant spelling of "star" That would seem to fit the
>>context.
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
>Tell me, where all past yeares are,
>Or who cleft the Divels foot,

Thanks Einde and Mike. That sounds like the solution. Apparently
that spelling was also used by Chaucer also.

Btw someone else has alerted me to the fact that MacSweeney is perhaps
using this spelling to suggest the emptiness left by a star which
exploded hundreds of years ago.

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Jos Horikx - 28 Apr 2004 19:02 GMT

>> Does anyone know what a starre is? It's not on dictionary.com and not
>> in Chambers.

...

>Perhaps it's a variant spelling of "star" That would seem to fit the
>context.

The word emerges more than once at:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~ahartley/Medieval_Astronomy.html

(I found that page because I suspected that "starre" was more or
less the same word as the Dutch word sterre ("stella maris" is in
dutch "sterre der zee", star of the seas...)

JH

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Discussion Groups / British English / April 2004

Starre