La croix du sud (The Southern Cross) is one of two songs Edgard Varèse composed for the 1921 set Offrandes, for orchestra and soprano. Its complex text by Dadaist poet José Juan Tablada, combined with Varèse's eclectic compositional style, results in a unique song curiously untouched in the analytical literature. The following paper explores Varèse's use of troping, symmetry, and spatial construction in La croix du sud -- in particular, I focus on how these devices reinforce thematic trajectories in the often baffling text. The traditional term "text-painting" fails to fully capture the nuanced relationships between the music and poem; Varèse instead responds to the text in abstract but significant ways, drawing connections within the music that underscore textual relations that might otherwise be missed. He mirrors the use of celestial themes in the text with a "celestial trope" -- melodic and harmonic fourths in both the orchestra as well as the voice. Furthermore, his use of registral space as well as contour responds to the passage from life to death in Tablada's text, which Tablada himself references both explicitly and through the imagery of progressively fading colors. Finally, analysis of a brief passage using Klumpenhouwer networks (K-nets) reveals an intricate web of interlocked isographies among the orchestral voices as well as the soloist. As is true with many of Varèse's works, a complete analysis requires the use of various tactics. La croix du sud shows that a synthesis of analytical tools leads to a rich interpretation of both the poem and the song.