Who are the "only lovers on Earth without blame or tears"?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.