“The Poetry of Heaven”:

The Polar Star and the Southern Cross Constellation in Australian Poetry, 1833—1899

Abstract

During a period in which the lure of the North Pole occupied the Victorian imagination as the definitive “sublime point”―the point at which all angular distances, longitudes and latitudes, actually meet―colonial poetry drew rich inspiration from two distinct celestial bodies in the vivid figuring of the Australian frontier as a place of infinite radius and unpredictability. This paper draws together the various symbolic imaginings of the Polar star―“Polaris”―and the Southern Cross constellation―“Crux”―in select colonial poetry for the purposes of revealing the similitudes between the Gothic sublime and the enmeshment of night sky gazing in Australian colonial poetry as a contradictory yet dual discourse of both displacement and emplacement. Contemplating the appearance of these twin constellations through verse-forms was an enterprise pliable enough to accommodate both literary artistic expression and the dualities of colonial identity; attempts to grasp the strangeness of Australia’s geographical vastness on the one hand, and, on the other, accommodating a sense of spatial awareness, place-ness, and belonging.