Warm Bask the Vines,
Light-thrilled
I
Warm bask the vines, light-thrilled, along your steeps,
Azure the fleet of islands hangs in azure,
On lichen'd rock the wrinkled lizard sleeps—
The shore's pine-odour, lifting, sighs for pleasure,
Telaro, Telaro!
Nets, too, festooned about your elfin port
Rough-carved out of the Etrurian mountainside,
Ripplings from golden luggers scarce distort
The image of the belfry where they ride.
Yet, on a black volcanic night long gone,
That bell-tower on the mole
Summon'd, while smouldering heaven with lightnings shone,
Scared and half-naked sleepers by its toll
And choked, delirious in its monotone,
All the narrow channels of your hamlet's soul.
II
Why beats the alarm? Fire? Shipwreck? Treachery?
Is it for some gang that from the macchia springs—
For Genoa's raid—the oppressor's piracy—
Or the Falcon of Sarzana that it rings,
Telaro, Telaro?
Is the boat-guild's silver plunder'd? Blood shall pay!
Hard-won the footing of your fishers' clan,
The sea-cloud watchers. Clash'd above the spray
That stinging iron cry, the appeal of man—
Enough, enough, the jeopardies of day—
Washes through tempest on!
And blood is up, and searchers seek to slay—
The tower shows empty! By the lightnings wan
They find no human ringer in the room.
The bell-rope quivers, out in the sea-spume.
III
A creature fierce, soft, witless of itself,
A morbid mouth, circled by writhing arms,
By its own grasp entangled on that shelf
Has dragged the rope and spread your deathalarms,
Telaro, Telaro!
From murk deeps light-forgotten, up from slime,
From ambush of sea-chasms issuing for prey
Submerged, hath used men's language of dismay;
The spawn of sunken times hath, late in time,
Clamber'd, and griefs upon man's grief imposed
Blindly. But fishers closed
The blind mouth, and cut off the suckers cold!
Two thousand fathoms your disturber rolled
From trough to trough into the gulf Tyrrhene;
And fear sank back into its night obscene.
IV
Yes, though 'twill surge again, this monstrous Past
To lash the ramparts of our little town—
Upheaves the despot, with his tangles vast,
Or fell Chance rises and the floods drag down,
Telaro, Telaro!
From cliffs of light our noblest in its coil—
Here the wild breakers closed over Shelley's head,
Pale furies swift, unconscious of their spoil,
Flung on your sea-cave's floor the dreamless dead—
Yet Power, elder than Time, terrible, bright,
Dwells in our race of care.
On the breast of Chance we are not parasite;
When the multiverse ungovernable Might
Confronts itself with dark bale and despair,
Then the Spirit of Man, pure spirit, shineth bare!
