THE TROUBLER OF TELARO

Warm vines bloom now along thy rampart steeps Thy shelves of olives, undercliffs of azure, And like a lizard of the red rock sleeps The wrinkled Tuscan sea, panting for pleasure. Nets, too, festooned about thine elfin port, Telaro, in the Etrurian mountain’s side, Heavings of golden luggers scarce distort The image of thy belfry where they ride. But thee, Telaro, on a night long gone That grey and holy tower upon the mole Suddenly summoned, while yet lightnings shone And hard gale lingered, with a ceaseless toll That choked, with its disastrous monotone, All the narrow channels of the hamlet’s soul.

For what despair, fire, shipwreck, treachery? Was it for threat that from the macchia sprang For Genoa’s feud, the oppressor’s piracy, Or the Falcon of Sarzana that it rang? Was the boat-guild’s silver plundered? Blood should pay. Hardwon the footing of the fishers’ clan The sea-cloud-watchers.—Loud above the spray The maddening iron cry, the appeal of man, Washed through the torchless midnight on and on. Are not enough the jeopardies of day? Riot arose—fear’s Self began the fray: But the tower proved empty. By the lightning’s ray They found no human ringer in the room.... The bell-rope quivered out in the sea-spume....

A creature fierce, soft, witless of itself, A morbid mouth, circled by writhing arms, By its own grasp entangled on that shelf, Had dragged the rope and spread the death-alarms; Insensitive, light-forgotten, up from slime, From shelter betwixt rocks, issuing for prey Disguised, had used man’s language of dismay. The spawn of perished times had late in time Emerged, and griefs upon man’s grief imposed Incalculable. But the fishers closed The blind mouth, and cut off the suckers cold. Two thousand fathoms the disturber rolled From trough to trough into the gulf Tyrrhene; And fear sank with it back into its night obscene. Herbert Trench