[In the following essay, Macainsh analyzes repetition, rhyme schemes, and allegory in Harpur's “Midsummer Noon” to emphasize its value as structurally sound poetry.]

Charles Harpur's poem “A Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest” is widely anthologised. The editor of The Penguin Book of Australian Verse, Professor Harry Heseltine, says of the poem that it arguably makes a ‘definitive contribution to the direction and pattern of our poetic history’.¹ Nevertheless, and despite the considerable critical notice of the poem, it seems to the present writer that adequate attention has yet to be given to the structure of the text itself, as well as to its unique place in Australian literature, if not to its place among the relatively few examples of its genre in literature generally. Rather, the critics have pronounced brief, varying summary judgements on the ‘total effect’ of the poem while giving as much attention or more to its alleged defects, chief of which are outmoded diction and breaches of a presumed contract to supply the reader with accurate natural description.

For example, the late James McAuley, in what is perhaps the most recent discussion of Harpur's poem, states that the poem ‘in a modest way, transcends mere description. It creates a sentiment, and celebrates the value of quiet “musing” or contemplation’.² However, this is McAuley's only recognition of the poem's transcendence of ‘mere description’ in a close examination largely taken up with tracking down putative faults in Harpur's knowledge of dragon-flies.

Brian Elliott, in his The Landscape of Australian Poetry, calls the poem ‘this dry song of the cicada’ and states that its mood ‘is of childhood at its exquisite terminus’.³ Although Elliott implies that the poem's ‘total effect’ is ‘successfully intuitive’,⁴ he nevertheless pronounces the poem to be imperfect, and instances Harpur's presumed misnaming of both the dragon-fly and the cicada. Other, and similar examples could be cited from the critics.

In view of this state of criticism on Harpur's poem, it is thought worthwhile to attempt here a so-called text-immanent approach, a structuralist analysis, in the belief that it will bring hitherto unnoticed features of Harpur's poem to light and will show that his presumed misnaming of insects and use of outmoded diction may have more justification than the critics so far have conceded him. This procedure of course does not obviate the complementary consideration of personal, social, cultural factors in the production and reception of Harpur's poem. But, as a preliminary operation, criticism must start out from ‘structure’, that is from comprehension of the system of relations internal to the text itself, and this is what appears to be relatively lacking in the case of Harpur's ‘Midsummer Noon’.

A pre-condition of structural analysis of literary texts is a knowledge of the results of structural linguistics, the basic principles of which were formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure in the years 1906 to 1911. The transfer of the structural method from linguistics to literary analysis is based primarily on the thesis that literary language is a deviation from normal language and should be analysed accordingly.

De Saussure has explained the function of language on the basis of selection of elements from paradigms and their combination into syntagms. A paradigm is explained here as a class of units which, from a certain aspect, are equivalent to each other, while differing when seen from another aspect. The paradigm is equal to a store of similar but differing signs, from which a sign is selected for use in discourse. It unites absent signs into a virtual memory sequence, that is, signs that are not actually present in the discourse are virtually present; or as de Saussure has it, paradigmatic relationships are ‘associative’. According to this view of language, each sign is selected from a specific store of other signs, which themselves do not occur in actual discourse but are virtually present by unconscious association. Each of the other signs is like the one selected, but they also oppose it in at least one respect. Furthermore, each sign is determined by its relationship to the signs that precede or follow it on the syntagmatic axis of the discourse as a whole. These paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships characterise the sign at the levels of both expression and content.

These considerations, together with the work of Roman Jakobson, Claude Levi-Strauss and others, have led to the paradigmatic structural analysis of literature practised initially by the French critic Roland Barthes. Barthes' method does not purport to provide answers to all questions concerning the rules governing a text, but it is thought to be sufficiently productive as a heuristic device to apply here.

Whereas a traditional interpretative approach would firstly ask of Harpur's poem what is the significance of the ‘birds and insects’, ‘hills’ and ‘plains’, and so on, so as to set up more or less essential relationships between these things and the assumed meaning of the poem, Barthes' method requires that the corresponding things or signs be released from their syntagmatic conjunction and be comprehended as members of a paradigm. This involves the detection of ‘repetitions’, as structural phenomena, at whatever level they occur, whether phonetic, phonological, morphematic or syntactic, as these always prove themselves ultimately to be phenomena of meaning.

Harpur's poem is as follows (the version given is from The Penguin Book of Australian Verse):

“A MIDSUMMER NOON IN THE AUSTRALIAN FOREST”

Not a sound disturbs the air,
There is quiet everywhere;
Over plains and over woods
What a mighty stillness broods!
All the birds and insects keep
Where the coolest shadows sleep;
Even the busy ants are found
Resting in their pebbled mound;
Even the locust clingeth now
Silent to the barky bough:
Over hills and over plains
Quiet, vast and slumbrous, reigns.
Only there's a drowsy humming
From yon warm lagoon slow coming:
'Tis the dragon-hornet—see!
All bedaubed resplendently,
Yellow on a tawny ground—
Each rich spot nor square nor round,
Rudely heart-shaped, as it were
The blurred and hasty impress there
Of a vermeil-crusted seal
Dusted o'er with golden meal.
Only there's a droning where
Yon bright beetle shines in air,
Tracks it in its gleaming flight
With a slanting beam of light,
Rising in the sunshine higher,
Till its shards flame out like fire.
Every other thing is still,
Save the ever-wakeful rill,
Whose cool murmur only throws
Cooler comfort round repose;
Or some ripple in the sea
Of leafy boughs, where, lazily,
Tired summer, in her bower
Turning with the noontide hour,
Heaves a slumbrous breath ere she
Once more slumbers peacefully.
O 'tis easeful here to lie
Hidden from noon's scorching eye,
In this grassy cool recess
Musing thus of quietness.

Firstly, certain “repetitions” occur in the very title of Harpur's poem. By syntagmatic conjunction and important position as title, these repetitions signal a fundamental compositional ordering in the poem, namely that of space.

The first repetition involves the words ‘A Midsummer Noon’. The repetitive element here is that of the zenith, common as height of year and height of day. We also notice here the internal syntagm of heat and height; the heat element is intensified by association with a specific point in time, that of mid-day of mid-summer. The second repetition involves the phrase ‘in the Australian Forest’. The word ‘forest’ on its own may induce in some readers a sense of the vertical, but the qualifier ‘Australian’ has a broad, geographical association, such that the concept ‘in the Australian Forest’ acquires a predominantly broad, horizontal character. The syntagmatic element of space formed by the title is essentially that of a vertical dimension penetrating a horizontal. If one considers the given totality of objects in Harpur's poem as defining a space, then in so doing one abstracts all properties of these objects except those that are defined by space-like relations. Already at the level of merely ideological modelling, the language of spatial relations is one of the basic means to comprehend reality. The directions of “heaven” and “hell”, “right” and “left”, “ahead”, “behind”, and so on, have long been modelling aids for social, religious, political and moral comprehension of the world. In the world of Harpur's poem, space is essentially the shape of an inverted cone. That is, there is a vertical dimension, and a horizontal dimension having maximum range above and restricted extent below, tending to a point-focus. The slanting sides of the cone find physical definition in ‘a slanting beam of light’, ripples and wave-like expressions, which will be returned to shortly. The elements distributed on this vertical axis are, at the upper end: a vastness, ‘a mighty stillness’, a reigning slumbrous quietness, a ‘scorching eye’, a brooding over plains and woods. At the lower end are: all the birds and insects, the poet, coolness, shadows, hiding, sleep, the pebbled mound, a grassy recess, the woman ‘summer’.

After the opening stanza has quickly indicated the top of the vertical scale, the second stanza describes the elements at the bottom, and then returns the reader's gaze upwards. The ‘pebbled mound’ (line 8) is the lowest point here. The image of the locust clinging silently to the bough reverses the direction to upward, preparing for the formal repetition of lines 1 and 2, as the conclusion of stanza 2.

Here, there would be a breaking-off of the poem, if it were not that the opening line, ‘Not a sound disturbs’, together with the antithetical discordant rhyme of lines 3 and 4, generates an on-reaching tension. A consideration of stanza 1 will make this clearer.

The first two lines of stanza 1 exhibit semantic parallelism, such that for non-poetic reading, the information given by the second line is redundant. However, read as poetry, the parallelism becomes ‘stylistic symmetry’, for which there is ample precedent in literary history; the Bible, for example, having many such repetitions.

Lines 3 and 4, which constitute the second half of the opening sentence of the poem show anaphoric repetition of ‘over’ in line 3 and, less overtly, phonemic repetition of “d” and “t” elements. Also, the “e”-vowel of ‘mighty’ in line 4 repeats that of ‘quiet’ in line 2. As with lines 1 and 2, we note that lines 3 and 4 taken together show semantic parallelism with the preceding lines, such that we could again speak of redundancy at the informational level but of stylistic symmetry as poetry. The structural effect of all these devices is to intensify the poem's opening statement.

We now consider Harpur's rhyme. At the lowest poetical level, we can distinguish in general between equivalences of position and those of sound. The point of intersection of these two classes of equivalence is defined as rhyme. All types of equivalence, including such secondary equivalences, generate the formation of additional semantic units. We can also define rhyme further as the congruence in sound of words or their parts in a position marked by reference to the rhythmical unit with accompanying semantic incongruence.

In Harpur's poem, lines 1 and 2 exhibit exact end-rhyme, ‘air’ and ‘everywhere’. However, the effect on the reader here is hardly a rich one because the semantic incongruence is weak; along with the congruence of sound we find that the meanings of ‘air’ and ‘everywhere’, in the present context, are virtually the same. In place of similarity of sound and contrast of meaning, we are confronted with two kinds of similarity. We are thus conditioned by the initial rhyme-pair to an uneventful congruence.

The second rhyme-pair, lines 3 and 4, however, contrasts strongly with the first by offering incongruence at both levels. ‘Woods’ and ‘broods’ offers eye-rhyme as well as final consonantal rhyme, but is an off-rhyme with regard to vowel sound. The sound of ‘broods’ at the end of the fourth line is as disturbing as it is unexpected, being intensified also by the following exclamation mark. As such, it returns the reader involuntarily to the opening statement of the poem, ‘Not a sound disturbs the air’, creating an antithetical response, a disquiet requiring subsequent resolution. The tension thus created is met by the opening of stanza 3, ‘Only there's a’ (line 13), introducing the dragon-hornet. This opening is anaphorically repeated as the opening of the next sentence (line 23), which introduces the second insect, ‘yon bright beetle’.

With the dragon-hornet, stanza 3 also introduces the horizontal direction, at a level well down on the vertical axis. The dragon-hornet is ‘slow coming’ from ‘yon warm lagoon’. The direction of motion is from a near periphery, into the centre. The hornet which is defined as a ‘large, strong, social wasp having an exceptionally severe sting’⁵ is conjoined here with a fiery, monstrous and mythical animal. It is the only active creature mentioned so far in the poem. The other, less fearsome creatures, already mentioned, are inert. The dragon-hornet itself emits only a ‘drowsy humming’, here exhibiting alliteration and metrical parallelism, and is ‘slow’. The paradox of fearsome name and mild behaviour is paralleled by that of its description, ‘bedaubed resplendently’, where the element of bedaubing, that is, to soil, smear, defile, paint coarsely, to lay or put on without taste,⁶ is conjoined with the element of magnificence, brilliant lustre or handsome accoutrement. The first specification of this bedaubing (line 17) is ‘yellow on a tawny ground’, which repeats the implicit imagery of the noon-day sun, the ‘scorching eye’ shining down over the tawny “ground” of woods and plains. The ‘resplendence’ is incongruent with ‘tawny’, must therefore associate with ‘yellow’; hence the dragon-hornet's markings are an image in miniature of a bird's-eye view (or ‘scorching’ sun's-eye view) of the world at large. Next, lines 18-19 convey the information that each ‘rich spot’ is ‘rudely heart-shaped’. The spots are resplendent yellow daubs, heart-shaped but lacking the proper perfection of that shape, and are as though due to the blurred and hasty impress of a ‘vermeil’, that is bright-red, crusted seal. These red ‘hearts’ are as if ‘dusted’ over with ‘golden meal’. There is a repetition of imagery here, with the incongruence that ‘yellow on a tawny ground’ now becomes gold on a bright-red ground.

Immediately, at the end of the description of the first active creature, the dragon-hornet, we are paratactically introduced to the second, ‘yon bright beetle’. The relativising opening of the previous sentence, ‘Only there's a’, (line 13) is repeated here for the sentence introducing the second creature (line 23).

The paradigm of the active insect reveals here certain incongruencies. Whereas the first insect was a ‘dragon-hornet’, this second one is a relatively milder ‘beetle’. The sound it emits is not a ‘drowsy humming’ but merely a ‘droning’. The yellow spots of the first insect are here the single spot of the ‘bright beetle’ shining in the sunlight. Its motion is not horizontal, ‘slow coming’ in, but is a ‘rising’ in ‘a slanting beam of light’, repeating in its direction the upward-pointing ‘locust’ image at the end of stanza 2. But whereas stanza 2 concluded with a return to the upper end of the vertical axis, the upward motion here does not reach as far. The beetle rises till its ‘shards flame out like fire’ or, as a later version has it, ‘Its shards flame out like gems on fire’. We note that the word ‘shards’ has meanings both of a shell-like wing-cover of a beetle and of a fragment, especially of broken earthenware. The movement upwards, against the ‘slanting beam of light’, leads to an apparent flaming out. There are repeated associations here, in both insect-descriptions, of cultural heritage, of the “Golden Age of Time” that Harpur is known to have been drawn to. The incongruence of the dragon-hornet's fierce name, and the resplendent hearts on its wings, with its mild behaviour, is paratactically matched here by the incongruence of the beetle's transfiguring rise into the light while droning. That both of these insects suggest further associations, for instance, with the sacred scarab of the Egyptians, a symbol of re-birth, or with Icarus, with the incongruence of earth-bound creatures who bear the spotted glory of age-old aspirations to conquest and transcendence, goes without saying, but cannot be pursued further here.

Suffice it to say that this second insect-motif is a repetition in diminuendo of the first. The insect rises, but the counter-direction of the ‘slanting beam of light’ remains to direct the reader still further downward to subsequent elements, initially to the ‘rill’, the third and only other thing that is ‘not still’. The poem thus includes the four “elements”, fire, air, earth and water. Though the activity of the rill is congruent with that of the two insects, it represents a still further step to insentience. The parallel here is that of wakefulness and water, of water that coolly ‘murmurs’. As the spatial focus of the poem narrows in, the manifestation of life decreases. High above, there is a vast, mighty, brooding consciousness while far below there is only the mindless murmur of the rill. The form of the rill associates with the ‘slanting’ beam of light, with the ‘ripple in the sea’ of leaves, with the ‘breath’ heaved by ‘summer’ and with “summer's” turning with the ‘noontide hour’. This slanting, wave-like motion in each case peters out downward, towards the unconscious and inert. Summer is depicted as a woman, lazy, tired, who turns over with the ‘noontide’ and then sinks once more into slumber. She is allusive of ‘yon warm lagoon’ from which the dragon-hornet comes. She is at the bottom of the inverted cone of space, where the poet also lies, ‘easeful’, ‘hidden from noon's scorching eye’, with the woman, ‘summer’. He is ‘musing thus of quietness’. Above, there is the ‘scorching eye’ and the vast stillness that broods, that is meditates with morbid persistence, or rests fixedly, over plains and woods.

Harpur's poem, like all artistically structured texts, models both a universal and a particular object, in this case a universal experience of midsummer noon and its particular occasion in the Australian forest. The blemishes that Harpur's critics point to are not blemishes of this structure as such, but are blemishes only when seen from the standpoint of an ‘imitation’ theory of art, requiring detailed naturalistic fealty to the specifically Australian setting of Harpur's experience. Harpur himself was clearly not so much interested in entomology or promoting Australianness in landscape as in drawing on his reader's associations so as to best structure for himself and them a unique experience transcending ‘mere description’.

Harpur's poem deals with a particular time of the day and year. An important example of the moods associated with the rhythmic progression of the times of the day and year is the sequence of moods of the seasons as it declares itself in progression from early morning, through the rising life of later morning, over the height of day, into the evening sun, or into the gathering dusk and finally comes to rest in the growing stillness of night. What the sympathetic witness feels here is not only a sequence of psychic states or a change of light in which the world and life appear, but that these states when seen more deeply are also various forms of access to hidden depths of reality only accessible in this way. In this sense, one can speak of a metaphysic of the times of day.

However, in seeking for poetical examples of the experience of midday, such as may have influenced Harpur, one makes the perhaps surprising discovery that whereas there are numerous examples of morning, evening and night poems, there is strikingly little poetry about the height of day as such. In the older, North European literature, this may be due to climate; the noon not being as striking as in hot climates. However, even in hot climates, the mid-day theme, as such, is not often dealt with.

It is noted here in passing that while Australian critics have sought for various possibilities of influence on Harpur's poem, including Andrew Marvell's ‘The Garden’,⁷ no one so far has mentioned John Clare's poem ‘Noon’, which seems to the present writer a much more likely influence:

All how silent and how still;
Nothing heard but yonder mill: …

However, though various poems could be cited as possible influences on Harpur's work, none of these poems exhibits the same clarity of structure of the mid-summer noon-day experience as does Harpur's poem itself.

What is more striking, however, is that if one extends one's purview to literary examples of the heightened noon-day experience in the wider world of European literature, then one finds certain quite unique experiences expressed, such as might appear to be merely the marks of a particular perhaps idiosyncratic author, were it not that the same features are to be found with some regularity, repeated in the works of other authors, often in similar words and images.

For example, Judith Wright, in her Preoccupations in Australian Poetry,⁸ has spoken of Nietzschean elements in Harpur's poetry. There can of course have been no direct influence, since Nietzsche's works would not have been available here until after Harpur's death. However, it is of interest that the experience of midday probably signified for Nietzsche his deepest experience and was of basic significance for his entire philosophy. As can be seen from ‘Zarathustra’ and ‘The Wanderer’, the experience of ‘The Great Midday’, as Nietzsche termed it, was one of stillness in heat, in which no sound or leaf stirred, in which the great god Pan slept, having an expression of eternity on his face. All living creatures were still, it was only the ever-springing fountain that played. Here, man experiences release from the passage of time, is lifted above individuation, is only a perceiving and knowing being, is empowered with an hitherto unknown fineness of perception—‘one sees much that he never saw’. This release from time is a contentment but a heavy, ambivalent one, having a menacing overpowering quality from its proximity to death.

Other poems that come to mind, on the midday theme, and which were certainly unknown to Harpur, are those of Paul Valery (‘Cimetière marin’), Stéphane Mallarmé (‘Tristesse d'Eté’, ‘L'Après Midi d'un Faune’, which certainly influenced Christopher Brennan's ‘Noon’ poem⁹), Leconte de Lisle (‘Midi’), and Gabriele d'Annunzio (‘Meriggio’).

From these various witnesses, including Nietzsche, one can discern some general features of the midday experience: The experience of midday is that of a stillness in which all life has come to rest and no sound is to be heard. The silence of midday is a quiescence both of human life and of surrounding nature, related to sleep and death. Borne by this stillness, in and around him, the poet feels himself to be at ease and harmony with surrounding nature. It is properly a returning of a pantheistic, even basically Pan-like and pagan experience that finds its full intensity only in hot zones (here Southern Europe). Merged with the surrounding stillness of life and borne by it, the poet feels himself freed from the fetters of individual existence. He merges into the nameless ground of eternity. The experience thus shows itself as a lifting above the flow of historical time into the higher plane of eternity. As a typically recurring symbol of this, there appears the closed circle. In brief, the experience of midday is a revelation of the world in its completeness, reached just at the height of the day. The midday, and the height of summer as midday of the year, and maturity as the midday of life, thus fuse to an inseparable unity.

The midday experience is of a rare, rather sombre happiness. The lifting above the limits of individual existence has a releasing and joyful effect but since the completed maturity of this existence simultaneously signifies the end of individuation, the illuminating experience of eternity is also accompanied by the shadowy premonition of death. This gives the easeful experience of midday an associated character of anxiety and foreboding. The experience is properly ambivalent.

From the foregoing, it can be seen that Harpur's poem too shares these general features. Naturally, there are departures of detail. Nature, for Harpur, is represented by the woman, ‘summer’, not the great god Pan. His diction,¹⁰ as of the locust that ‘clingeth’ to the ‘barky bough’, suggests, like Nietzsche's, the Old Testament, as might also the ‘scorching eye’ above; though these elements when taken together with other elements of the poem might just as well suggest Egyptian, pagan times. In any case, great antiquity is implied. Also, the tension of Harpur's poem, related to the polarity of joyful release and the foreboding of death, is less marked than in the poetry of Nietzsche and d'Annunzio or even in that of Brennan. However, there is no doubt that the Australian poet, as the structure of his poem reveals and despite his possible inaccuracies of natural description, has shared a unique and valuable experience with his fellow poets.

Notes

1. Harry Heseltine, ed., The Penguin Book of Australian Verse (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books, 1972), p.32.

2. James McAuley, The Rhetoric of Australian Poetry, Southerly, No. 1, (1976), 5.

3. Brian Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1967), p.67.

4. p.68.

5. Webster's International Dictionary.

6. Ibid.

7. Leon Cantrell, ‘Marvell and Charles Harpur’, Australian Literary Studies, 6 (1973), 88-90.

8. Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: O.U.P. [Oxford University Press], 1965), p.15.

9. cf. Elliott, pp.266-7.

10. Elizabeth Perkins, in an unpublished M.A. thesis on Harpur, University of Queensland, has suggested that ‘not one word in the poem would have seemed alien to a colonist’ (p.126).