Ohio History Journal

36                      OHIO HISTORY

 

 

WINE BARON'S CASTLE

 

Marblehead Peninsula: Lake Erie

 

 

 

Low thunderheads like distant nebulous hills

Hovering on the horizon, and the lake

In silvered calm, reflective eye of summer,

Casting on earth and sky a spell of vast

And brooding quiet -- almost as if time

Were an unchanging landscape and its motions,

With those of wind and weather, all suspended;

That was the afternoon we found the house

Known to us only by vague history

And local legend, then an echoing shell

Of leprous stone with shattered windows staring

Through the ranked maples on its limestone hill.

 

 

 

"The wine baron's castle," you said; and from that moment

It so became for us who sensed, exploring,

That here had been no ordinary flaunt

Of pride, but a nurtured dream: the old-world winegrower,

Finding in soil and climate gifts like the homeland's,

Had then, as crown of his discovery,

To build his wine chateau.

 

 

 

Before us the remnants,

Once-gilded rooms with sadly faded murals

Soiled by time and squatters' depredations

Kindled the imagination till we heard --

Or so that day we said -- a phantom music

And felt around us phantom presences

In a cobweb-draped salon once famous for

Its harvest mural and its marble muse.

WINE BARON'S CASTLE                                              37

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time then reversed or stopped? That music heard

Was of the afternoon: of lake and sky

And crumbling house merged in summer haze;

The presences our pliant selves projected

Into a past that couldn't have been ours:

That place for us no home of memory.

 

 

 

But now, we're told, those rooms our fancy haunted

Are gone: the castle razed for tourist cabins

To mark its plot beneath the maples -- puny

Mockeries of pride, like huts replacing

The classic temple on the classic hill.

And though it shall, as at the hour named,

Remain while we remain part of our musing

Selves, no less substantial than that halcyon

Summer afternoon, it may not carry

Other meaning than the time it touched

With momentary magic, vision shared.

 

 

 

There was for us no home of memory.

 

 

THE AUTHOR: Martin Scholten is

Professor of English at the University of

Toledo.