worthwhile. Even the smallest of flowers takes on great significance when beloved by the poet.
The sonnet entitled “La Fleur de Campêche,” ends with these two tercets:
Tout ce qui fut créé, dans l’éternel mystère,
En émanations pour les cieux, pour la terre,
--Celles d’un front de femme, ou bien celles des fleurs, --Ne vaut pas l’humble odeur que répand ma fleurette,
Quand, au matin, la brise, en secouant ses pleurs,
Fait trembler dans les airs sa gracieuse aigrette. (9-14)Metaphorically representing the budding of national cultural in Haiti, the many flowersdescribed in Book Two are simple, idealized, hardly disturbed by modern progress. In and of
themselves, the poems about flowers may not at all be related to national issues, unless this
poeticized Haitian landscape can, in Herder’s view, be opposed to the oppressive workings of the
state. Herder considered the state a destructive force which crushes cultural flowers in bloom.^208
This interpretation will be most plausible when examining poems about the on-going meaning of
the Haitian Revolution and the symbolism of nature in these texts.
As mentioned earlier, those simple evocations of nature in the quatrains of “La voix de lapatrie” also recall the verse of French poets associated with Parnassian poetry, such as Verlaine,
Gautier, or de Banville. While the diversity of the Parnassian movement is difficult to consider
fully here, many elements in Durand’s nature poems may also be traceable to his knowledge of
nature poetry outside the influences of Romanticism. I find that the attraction and application of
these Parnassian moments in Durand’s poetry lies in the emphasis it gives to the cult of beauty in
the visible world as opposed to the invisible world of Romanticism. Although Haitian land
increasingly became the site for devalued crops, foreign ownership, and loss of independence,
the visible elements of nature, however threatened, were still present. Describing these elements
(^208) Herder xxi.