If you live in Tenerife or any of the principal Canary Islands, it's impossible to not realize that the landscape has been resculpted by volcanic explosions in years gone by.
The last one in Tenerife was November 18 1909. The following extract from a poem by William Cowper, although written about Mount Etna, Italy, is very appropriate and could have been written about Mount Teide.
Slept unperceived, the mountain yet entire;
When, conscious of no danger from below,
She towered a cloud capped pyramid of snow,
No thunders shook with deep intestine sound
The blooming groves that girdled her around.
Her unctuous olives and her purple vines
Unfelt the fury of those bursting mines
The peasant’s hopes, and not in vain, assured,
In peace upon her sloping sides matured.
When on a day, like that of the last doom,
A conflagration laboring in her womb,
She teemed and heaved with an infernal birth,
That took the circling seas and solid earth.
Dark and voluminous the vapor rise,
And hang their horrors in the neighboring skies,
While through the Stygian veil, that blots the day,
In dazzling streaks the vivid lightning's play.
But oh! what muse, and in what powers of song,
Can trace the torrent as it burns along?
Havoc and devastation in the van,
It marches over the prostrate works of man;
Vines, olives, herbage, forests disappear.
Heroism by William Cowper (1731-1800)
