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Marceline Desbordes-Valmore was a 19th century French Romantic poet. In her poem "Dans l'été" the middle verse reads:

Partout les nids et les ailes.
 Tremblent doucement,
Dénonçant des tourterelles
 L’entretien charmant ;
L’été brûle avec mystère
 Dans les lits en fleurs
Des seuls amants de la terre
 Sans blâme et sans pleurs.

My translation:

Everywhere, nests and wings
 Quiver softly,
Indicating the turtledoves’
 Charming tete-a-tetes;
Summer burns with mystery
 In the beds in bloom
Of the only lovers on earth
 Without blame or tears.

My question is: who are the "only lovers on Earth without blame or tears"? The only possibilities I see for this are the turtledoves and the flowers.

If it's the turtledoves, why would Desbordes-Valmore have used the word lits (beds) and not nids (nests)? It's not a question of scansion; he poem would scan no matter which one she used. And furthermore, why would their beds be in bloom?

And if it's the flowers, do they really count as lovers?

Of course, it's entirely possible that she was leaving the interpretation ambiguous; this wouldn't surprise me very much.

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  • Let me add ... if anybody sees a mistake in my translation, please leave a comment.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Sep 4 at 21:01
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    "Denounce" as a translation of "dénoncer" does not seem to work here. I would look at the sixth meaning in Wiktionnnaire: "Indiquer par des indices."
    – Tsundoku
    Commented Sep 4 at 21:18
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    @Tsundoku: Thank you. In fact, TLFI uses this very line as an example in their definition of dénoncer.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Sep 5 at 18:11
  • dénoncer here: revealing. The nests and wings reveal the presence of turtledoves...otherwise, you wouldn't know they are there. The internal rhyme between nids and lits is clever.
    – Lambie
    Commented Oct 17 at 17:30

2 Answers 2

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As the other answer points out, this poem is quite puzzling, but I have figured it out an interpretation I am satisfied with. In this interpretation, the “only lovers on earth // Without blame or tears” are turtledoves.

There is a popular belief, among both French and English speakers, that turtledoves mate for life and are completely faithful. This blog says:

TOURTERELLE, Nous nous sommes habitués à considérer cet oiseau comme l'emblème de la fidélité conjugale, et les poëtes ont dit de fort jolies choses à ce sujet.
TURTLEDOVE, We are accustomed to considering this bird to be the emblem of marital fidelity, and poets have said some very pretty things on this subject.

Further, I now have an interpretation for the two lines that I found the most puzzling:

L’été brûle avec mystère
Dans les lits en fleurs ...
Summer burns with mystery
In the flowering beds ...

I believe that in the first of these lines, the "mystery" is that of childbirth (or maybe child-hatching, since we are dealing with birds). And in the second one, "the flowering beds" is a metaphor for nests with baby birds in them.

The themes this second stanza brings up, of lovers in tears, and of childbirth, connect quite well with the third (and last) stanza, where the speaker asks Summer to send a rain cloud if her daughter lingers in the orchard, so as to save her daughter from "mortal pleasure" ("plaisir mortel").

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  • The part about the turtledoves would make sense indeed! Not so sure about the rain cloud - why would it be a "cruel charm"? If it's the same thing as the "shadow" and the "dark" from the first stanza, why is it a danger that "makes all beings dream"? what's so lustful about summer clouds?
    – guillaume31
    Commented Oct 18 at 8:21
  • For the rain cloud, nue is an archaic word for nuage, or cloud. And in French, Wiktionary says that charme can mean "magic spell", just as in English. I don't know what a cloud could do to prevent "mortal pleasure" except to rain. The lust doesn't come from the cloud, it's why the girl lingers in the orchard; the speaker asks Summer to release his cruel charm and make the cloud rain so as to prevent the consequences of the lust. As for the first stanza, I don't completely understand it.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Oct 18 at 12:56
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    @guillaume31: Pardon me if I explained things that you already knew in my previous comment, but I want it to make sense to people who don't speak French.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Oct 18 at 14:17
  • @gillaume31: Although I don't understand the first stanza completely, I can give my thoughts on it. I believe the ombre is simply twilight—night is falling. The danger is the same as the one in the third stanza: the danger of being seduced—the evening is too beautiful for somebody to resist seduction.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Nov 3 at 20:27
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The metaphors in the poem are very cryptic even for a native French speaker. I assume "les seuls amants de la terre qui..." ties back to "tout ce qui respire" from the first verse - i.e. all of nature's beings, who, unlike human lovers, don't know blame or tears.

Personifying nature is a big trope in romanticism, however it's difficult to pinpoint exactly which species, plants or natural phenomena are characterized in some passages of the poem. Maybe there is something symbolic that escapes me, but the whole piece feels more like a rêverie made of Desbordes' train of thoughts while she was watching a summer sunset in the countryside than something to take too rationally.

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  • I think you're right, in that the purpose of the first two stanzas is mainly to set the mood of the poem, for the payoff in the third stanza. So maybe it doesn't pay to overanalyze them.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Sep 13 at 12:50

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