Just started

reading Ted Hughes' "Tales from Ovid." (Yesterday was a small poetry-buying spree - Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon.) I'm fascinated by it. I should probably do a little more research on Ovid himself - but from all accounts, Ted Hughes' version is incredibly accurate, so maybe I can kind of cheat and not really read the original source material for now.

I got through the first section - "Creation; Four Ages; Flood; Lycaon." The description of the flood is beautiful - much better than anything you get in the Bible.


Men are rowing in circles aimlessly, crazed,
Where they ploughed straight furrows or steered wagons.
One pitches a sail over corn
Another steers his keel
Over his own chimney.
One catches a fish in the top of an elm.
Anchors drag over grazing
Or get a grip under vine roots.
Where lean goats craned for brown tufts
Fat seals gambol over and under each other.

The nereids roam astounded
Through submerged gardens,
Swim in silent wonder into kitchens,
Touch the eyes of marble busts that gaze
Down long halls, under the wavering light.

Dolphins churn through copses.
Hunting their prey into oak trees, they shake out acorns
That sink slowly.


There is a choatic beauty to the vision that somehow links so relevantly to the state of the world today. Sometimes I wish God WOULD just flood us and get it over with. If he did, though, would we get the message? Or would we be the marble busts, gazing silently and unfazed through the water, assuming that this is just another example of the oddities of life? Perhaps some would turn into busts, and the rest, realizing too late that they had abandoned their faith in God to worship


... the love of gain - a new god
Made out of the shadow
Of all the others. A god who peers
Grinning from the roots of the eye-teeth ...


would end up as Ovid's (and Hughes') humans do:


Drowned mankind, imploring limbs outspread,
Floats like a plague of dead frogs.