Month: June 2025

“…..And so I ride (which is my metaphor)

A full-sailed ship upon an endless sea,

A universe where nothing stays the same,

Sea, sky, wind, earth and time forever changing –

Time like a river in its ceaseless motion;

On, on, each speeding hour cannot stand still,

But as waves, thrust by waves, drive waves before them,

So time runs first or follows forever new;

The flying moment gone, what once seemed never

Is now, which vanishes before we say it,

Each disappearing moment in a cycle,

Each loss replaced within the living hour.

…..Though all four are of different place and kind,

Each comes from each, and to each returns:

Loose earth becomes a fluid, and as it flows

To water, water itself will change to air,

And air to fire which rises over it

To climb the highest reaches of the heavens.

They then return, last first in backward order,

Fire in smoky air, from air to water, 

And waves changed into marshes turn to earth.

Nothing retains the shape of what it was,

And Nature, always making old things new,

Proves nothing dies within the universe,

But takes another being in new forms.

What is called birth is change from what we were,

And death the shape of being left behind.

Though all things melt or grow from here to there,

Yet the same balance of the world remains.

…..And now the measure of my song is done:

The work has reached its end; the book is mine,

None shall unwrite these words: nor angry Jove, 

Nor war, nor fire, nor flood,

Nor venomous time that eats our lives away.

Then let that morning come, as come it will,

When this disguise I carry shall be no more,

And all the treacherous years of life undone,

And yet my name shall rise to heavenly music,

The deathless music of the circling stars.

As long as Rome is the Eternal City

These lines shall echo from the lips of men.

As long as poetry speaks truth on earth, 

That immortality is mine to wear.”

Excerpts from Ovid’s The Metamorphoses Book XV, the doctrines of Pythagoras and the Epilogue translated by Horace Gregory (New York: Viking Press, 2009)  from pages 413 – 437.