SOURCE: Macainsh, Noel. “Charles Harpur's ‘Midsummer Noon’—A Structuralist Approach.” Australian Literary Studies 8, no. 4 (October 1978): 439-45.

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...