Metamorphoses

  Ino’s attendants caught up to her in time

  to see her leaping from the summit’s edge;

  her death assured, they mourned the house of Cadmus,

  beating their breasts, tearing their hair and garments,

  and reproving the goddess for the cruel

  injustice shown the wife of Athamas.

  Juno would not hear it: “My cruelty?

  Yourselves will be its greatest monuments!”

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  No sooner had she spoken when it happened,

  as Ino’s most devoted servant cried,

  “I will attend upon her in the waves,”

  and poised in the very moment of her leap,

  she froze, as though connected to the rock;

  another, who’d been beating her own breasts,

  felt her arms stiffen as she lifted them;

  a third, who, as it happened, stretched her hands

  over the waters, turned into a figure

  of stone, her hands outstretched to that same ocean;

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  and yet another of the women froze

  just as she started tearing out her hair

  Each one inhabited her final gesture,

  and those of the attendants who escaped

  this cruel fate, were turned into seabirds,

  who skim the surface of those troubled waters.

  Cadmus and Harmonia

  Now Cadmus had no notion that his daughter

  and little grandson had become sea gods;

  but overwhelmed by evil upon evil,

  by all of the misfortunes he’d endured

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  and by the many portents that he’d seen,

  went out of Thebes, the city he had founded,

  as though not his, but its fortune oppressed him;

  and driven to wandering for many years,

  he and his wife came to the Illyrian coast,

  where all the ills they had so long endured

  weighed down on them, and they stopped to consider

  the fates of their offspring and their own distress.

  “Was it a sacred serpent that I speared,”

  asked Cadmus, “when, newly come from Sidon,

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  I sprinkled the viper’s teeth upon the ground, and seeded a new crop of human beings?

  If that is what the gods have been avenging

  by their unwavering wrath for all these years, why then, I pray that I might be extended

  into a serpent with a gut-like shape—”

  And as he said it he became a serpent

  with a gut-like shape. At once he felt the scales

  begin to grow out on his thickened skin,

  and his dark body lighten up with patches

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  of irridescent blue; he fell upon his breast,

  and his two legs were blended into one,

  which, gradually lengthening, became

  an elegant and sharply pointed tail.

  His arms remained unchanged; he held them out,

  and as the tears coursed down his cheeks (which were

  still—for the moment—human), he exclaimed,

  “Come closer to me, O most wretched wife,

  and while there is still something left of me,

  before I am entirely transformed

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  to serpent, touch me, take these hands in yours!”

  He would have said much more, but suddenly

  the tip of his tongue divided into two,

  and words no longer would obey his wishes,

  so that whenever he tried to complain

  or grieve, he hissed, and could not manage more,

  for he had been left with no other voice.

  Now striking her bare breast, his wife cries out,

  “Cadmus! Stay as you are! Put off these strange

  shapes now possessing you, unfortunate man!

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  Cadmus, what’s happening? Where are your feet?

  Your face? Complexion? Even as I speak,

  where is the rest of you! Heavenly beings,

  will you not also turn me to a snake?”

  The creature’s tongue flicked lightly over her lips,

  and he slipped in between her cherished breasts

  as though he were familiar with the place,

  embraced her, and slid right around her neck.

  Those of his companions who were present

  were horrified, but she just calmly stroked

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  the smooth, sleek neck of the crested dragon,

  and at once there were two serpents intertwined,

  who presently went crawling off and found

  a hiding place within a nearby grove.

  But these days, they no longer flee from men,

  nor do they harm them; mindful of their former

  identities, they’re very gentle dragons.

  Perseus and Atlas

  Nevertheless, their mighty nephew Bacchus

  was comfort to them both in their changed shapes,

  worshiped as he was throughout defeated

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  India, and in crowded Grecian temples;

  only Acrisius, his relative,

  will not admit him to his city, Argos;

  Acrisius makes war against the god,

  whom he denies was the true son of Jove,

  and says the very same thing about Perseus,

  conceived by Danaë in a rain of gold.

  So mighty is the force of truth revealed

  that not long after this, Acrisius

  repented of his outrage to the god

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  and of the way he slighted his own grandson.

  One is installed in heaven now, the other,

  returning with his memorable trophy

  after the snake-coiffed monster had been slain,

  goes gliding through thin air on humming wings,

  and while he over flies harsh Libya,

  the blood drops trickle from the Gorgon’s head;

  reaching the ground, these come to life as snakes

  of various kinds; and that is why today

  serpents infest that whole unpleasant land.

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  Driven this way and that by sparring winds

  through heaven’s great immensity, as though

  of no more substance than the dewy mist,

  he looked down from a great height onto earth

  as he flew over it; thrice to the frigid north,

  thrice to the far south; to the west often,

  and just as often to the east he flew.

  The setting sun made further flight too risky;

  he landed on the borders of the west

  in the realm of Atlas, where he sought his ease

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  until the morning star should summon Dawn,

  and Dawn bring forth the carriage of the Day.

  Atlas, the son of Iapetas, was huge,

  greater in bulk than all men put together.

  He ruled earth’s western border and the sea

  which welcomed the panting horses of the Sun

  and his worn-out chariot at end of day.

  A thousand herds of cattle and as many

  flocks of fat sheep were grazing on his meadows;

  there were no neighbors nearby to confine him.

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  A tree he had, whose leaves of shining gold

  concealed gold fruit and branches underneath.

  “Mine host,” said Perseus, “if the renown

  of noble birth is what impresses you,

  why, I’m the son of Jove! If mighty deeds

  are what you marvel at, marvel at mine!

  I seek both hospitality and rest.”

  But Atlas called to mind the prophecy

  given him by Themis of Parnassus:

  “A time will come when your bright golden tree

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  will be
despoiled, Atlas; and the spoils will go

  to one who styles himself the son of Jove.”

  In order to forestall this, Atlas built

  a mighty wall to fence his orchard in,

  and set an enormous dragon to patrol

  his boundaries and keep all strangers out.

  “Go far from here,” said Atlas. “All these lies

  about your deeds of glory won’t avail you,

  and as for Jupiter—he’s nowhere near!”

  Now Atlas tries to drive the stranger off

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  with force as well as threats, but Perseus

  stands up to him, yet tries to calm him down

  with pacifying speech. At length, perceiving

  himself—who wouldn’t be?—the weaker, says,

  “Well, since the little favor that I ask

  seems too important to you to be granted,

  take this instead!” The hero turned his back

  to Atlas and raised up in his left hand

  the unkempt horror of Medusa’s head.

  Atlas became a mountain just as large

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  as the man had been. His hair and beard became

  a forest, and his arms and shoulders turned

  into adjacent ridges; his head was now

  the mountain’s summit and his bones were rock.

  Each part grew to extraordinary size

  (as you immortals had ordained), until

  the weight of heaven rested on his shoulders.

  Perseus and Andromeda

  Aeolus had just finished locking up

  the winds in prison underneath Mount Etna,

  and the morning star that summons men to work

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  had risen brightly in the eastern sky.

  Perseus strapped his wings onto his feet

  and armed himself again with his hooked sword,

  and with his swift-winged sandals split the air.

  The world fell back away from him in flight

  till he saw Ethiopia beneath him

  and near it, the kingdom ruled by Cepheus,

  where Ammon had condemned Andromeda

  (the one unjust, the other innocent)

  to pay the price for her own mother’s speech.

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  At sight of her, bound high upon a cliff,

  he would have thought that she’d been carved from stone

  were it not for the breeze that stirred her hair

  and for the warm tears flowing from her eyes;

  the woman’s beauty quite astounded him,

  and left him witless, to the point that he

  almost forgot to keep his wings in motion.

  “Oh!” he said. “These chains don’t do you justice;

  the only chains that you should wear are those

  that ardent lovers put on in their passion.

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  But what’s your name and land of origin,

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  and why are you chained up?”

  At first the maiden

  would not address the man, for modesty,

  and would have used her hands to hide her face

  were they not tightly bound; her eyes, however,

  as they welled up with tears, said everything.

  At his insistence, she (lest she appear

  to be concealing some fault of her own)

  told him her name, and land of origin,

  and how it happened that her mother’s trust

  in her own beauty brought her to this pass;

  and in the middle of her tale, the sea

  erupted with the roar of a great beast

  who rose up as he breasted the wide water.

  The virgin screams, her parents mourn with her,

  all miserable—though she has greatest cause.

  They have no help to offer her, except

  for weeping, wailing, thumping on their breasts,

  and clinging to the chains around her body,

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  as is appropriate to the occasion.

  The stranger said, “There will be time enough

  for weeping, by and by—but brief indeed

  the time in which bold actions may succeed!

  If I, as Perseus, the son of Jove

  and she to whom he came in a rain of gold,

  had sought your daughter—Perseus, the hero

  who slew the snake-haired Gorgon and was bold

  to take to the air, borne on soaring wings—

  I would no doubt have been preferred to all suitors as son-in-law material.

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  But, with the gods’ permission, I will try

  to add to these endowments by my service;

  the deal is that she’s mine if I can save her.”

  They take his offer (who would hesitate?)

  and promise him a kingdom as his dowry.

  But look! Just as the beak of a swift ship

  ploughs through the waves when all its oarsmen strain,

  that beast divides the water with his breast,

  no farther from the rocks than one could send

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  a shot launched from a Balearic sling;

  when suddenly the young man leapt from earth

  into the clouds; his shadow on the sea

  provoked the beast to strike at it in fury.

  And just as when Jove’s bird, the eagle, sees

  a snake sunning itself idly in a field,

  he strikes from behind, avoiding the fierce maw,

  and sinks his talons in the scaly back;

  so Perseus, through the resistless air

  swoops and dives at the monster from behind,

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  and plunges his sword right up to the hilt

  into the shoulder of the raging beast.

  Tormented by that wound, it rises up

  into the air, it crashes to the water

  and turns in terror and confusion, like

  a boar surrounded by the baying pack.

  The hero flees its jaws on speedy wings,

  and where the beast is vulnerable, strikes

  with his hooked blade: now slashes at the back,

  inlaid with barnacles, now jabs the sides,

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  and now strikes where the beast is slenderest,

  at that place where its tail spreads like a fish’s.

  The serpent vomits up a purple froth

  of blood and salty water in a spray

  that dampens our hero’s drooping pinions,

  which he no longer can rely upon;

  he spies a rock whose summit breaks the water

  when the sea is calm, but otherwise is hidden;

  bracing himself against its surface, he

  clutches the jagged rock with his left hand,

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  and with his right, he time and time again

  plunges his sword into the serpent’s guts.

  Applause reverberates along the shore

  and from the mansions of the gods above;

  Cepheus and Cassiope, the parents,

  rejoice in their new son-in-law, and hail him

  as prop and savior of their family;

  the unbound virgin steps forth from her chains,

  well worth the trouble that her troubles caused him.

  Water is drawn: before the hero washes

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  his serpent-slaying hands, he carefully

  constructs a little nest there on the beach,

  of some soft leaves with seaweed strewn upon them,

  and there he rests Medusa’s snake-fringed head,

  lest she be damaged by the beach’s gravel.

  Thirsty fresh twigs, still living, still absorbent,

  soak up the monster’s force, and at its touch

  rigidify through every branch and leaf.

  Astounded sea nymphs try experiments

  on other twigs and get the same results;

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  delighted, they toss them back into the sea

  as seeds to propagate this new species!

  Coral today shows the same properties;

  its branches harden when exposed to air,

  and what was—in the water—a spry twig

  becomes a rock when lifted out of it.

  The hero builds three altars out of turf:

  one on the left for Mercury, and one

  for the warlike virgin goddess on the right,

  and in between, an altar for great Jove;

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  a cow is slain for Minerva, and a calf

  for the swift god with wings upon his feet,

  but a bull to thee, highest of all gods.

  At once the hero takes Andromeda

  without a dowry, given that she herself

  is a reward sufficient to his labors.

  Now Love and Marriage shake the wedding torches,

  and burning aromatics scent the air;

  houses are garlanded, and everywhere

  are lyres, flutes, and singers singing songs

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  that make their argument for happiness.

  The folding doors are opened to reveal

  a golden hall where a great banquet is about to start,

  attended by the princes of the realm.

  Perseus and Medusa

  When they had finished dinner and were all

  gladdened by the liberal gifts of Bacchus,

  Perseus asked his hosts about the region,

  the manner and mores of the folk that lived there.

  After responding, his informant said,

  “Now tell us, gallant Perseus, how strength

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  and cleverness let you lay hands upon

  that head whose hair is woven through with snakes.”

  So Perseus told them of that place beneath

  frigid Mount Atlas, guarded by its bulk,

  within whose entryway two sisters live,

  daughters of Phorcys, who shared a single eye:

  while one was passing it off to the other,

  her pass was intercepted by our hero,

  who palmed it cleverly and slipped away.

  And then by trekking through remote and distant

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  byways, through fearful forests and rough rocks,

  he came at last to where the Gorgon lived.

  And everywhere, in fields, along the roads,

  he witnessed the sad forms of men and beasts

  no more themselves, but changed now into stone,

  misfortunates, who’d glimpsed Medusa once.

  He too had once looked upon her image,

  but it had been reflected in the shield

  of bronze our hero bore in his left hand;

  and while sleep held Medusa and her snakes,

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  he struck her head off; from their mother’s blood

  sprang swift Pegasus and his brother both.