It is difficult to imagine listening to this beautiful song cycle without feeling deeply moved and struck with a sense of loss. There can be no doubt that Lili Boulanger realized she was destined to have a short life and expressed this knowledge in these songs.

In 1913, her friend Miki Piré gave her a book of poems by Francis Jammes, Clarières dans le ciel (Clearings in the Sky). Lili began work on them while she and Piré stayed in Nice in 1913 and continued work in 1914 at the Villa Medici in Rome, while she was on her mandatory residence as a winner of the Prix de Rome. She left Rome before the year was up (sources differ on whether this was because her health broke or because of the outbreak of World War I), and she finished the cycle in Paris.

Jammes was a member of the poetic group called the Symbolists, a group that was particularly important in France and Russia. In a typical symbolist poem, a tangible object becomes a focus—sometimes a metaphor—of deep feelings. In this set, the feelings under discussion are the poet's lost love. Boulanger chose 13 of the 24 poems and assembled them in a new order that created a new dramatic flow. Poetically, images of flowers recur throughout.

In addition to the original version with piano accompaniment, Boulanger orchestrated eight of the songs. Many of these songs are remarkable in musical gesture, expressed in a language that draws from the late songs of Fauré and the stylistic traits of Debussy's Impressionism. The entire cycle is 40 minutes long, with the last song being almost ten minutes in duration. This final song, Demain fera un an, is a complex and highly allusive song. It quotes the prior song "Through what I've suffered," thus personalizing its final tragedy. In the end, to the words "Nothing more. I have nothing more. Nothing to sustain me," Boulanger directly considers her own mortality in much the same way—poetically, thought not so much musically—as Gustav Mahler in the repeated word "Forever..." at the end of his Song of the Earth. Tenor David Devries, a friend of the composer, sang the cycle's premiere at a concert of the Societé National in Paris on March 8, 1918. Lili Boulanger died one week later.

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