Ô ma belle-de-nuit, ferme, ferme ta robe.

Notes from the Archivists

Nau's sonnet is built the way sonnets usually are: two quatrains setting the scene, two tercets turning it. The octave tells the flower to close up against the sun; the sestet promises what happens once night lets it open again, ending on the poem's frankest line — “l'essaim des voluptés,” the swarm of pleasures gathering in “ton lit d'amour,” your bed of love. It's a poem about a plant with an unmistakably human ending.

The song, like several other files in this collection, promotes the opening quatrain to chorus and repeats it well past its original single appearance. What's different here is what happens at the very end. Every other entry in this archive that reorders its source still finds a way to close on the source's own final line or a fragment of it. This one doesn't. The bridge delivers Nau's actual last couplet — the “essaim des voluptés” payoff the whole poem was building toward — and then the song moves past it, back to the chorus, back to “ferme, ferme ta robe,” ending where it began instead of where Nau ended.

That's arguably the more faithful choice for this particular flower. A belle-de-nuit doesn't bloom once and finish; it closes at dawn and opens again at dusk, night after night, on a loop that doesn't know from “ending.” A song that resolved on the poem's climax would be more conventional. A song that circles back to close, close your dress after already showing you what happens when it opens is staying loyal to the plant's actual schedule.

There's also the matter of who wrote it. Ignace Nau was writing in Haiti roughly a decade after Pindemonte finished his Odyssey and a generation before Dickinson's fascicles — part of the first wave of Haitian writers working in French Romantic form to build a literature of their own, right after independence. He died young, largely uncelebrated outside specialist circles since. Filed here next to Baudelaire and Poe, on equal footing, is roughly the point.