societal realities, the rires and pleurs of a poet’s existence, is not so dissimilar from the poet’s
condition outside Haiti. The importance of establishing Durand as a poet per se will take on
additional relevance later in this chapter.
Before concluding this section, I would like to highlight a neglected aspect of Durand’spoetics. The Romantic poems examined here, while representative in tone, verse, and sensibility
of many of Durand’s poems, do not account completely for the flexibility of Durand’s poetics.
Sections of “La voix de la patrie,” for example, which interpose short tributes to nature, point to
other poetic possibilities. This poem signals sources of inspiration and other forms and verse
also characteristic of Durand’s corpus. The first poem in Book Two, “Génie-inspirateur”
exemplifies the light-hearted descriptions of love and nature so characteristic of this second part
of the collection. One stanza begins:
Dis-moi des strophes d’amour
En ce jour,
Des refrains pleins d’harmonie,
Chante le ciel, la clarté
La beauté,
Cette fleur sainte et bénie! (1-6)Much of Book Two reflects moments of poetic confidence. Its focus is on the beauty ofHaiti’s land, the simple joys found in descriptions of nature, and portraits of youthful love. The
varied versification in the poem above recalls the freedom of poets’ technique. The theme
reflects the diverse possibilities of poetic inspiration summarized in “A l’Auteur de Nella.” Very
few of the poems in this second book are dated, but it appears that they were written during or
shortly after Durand’s travel through the Haitian countryside during several months of 1874-
- In a series of articles that Durand submitted many years later to Haïti littéraire et sociale,
he explains how the arrival of a French tourist led to his own exploration of the Haitian