Despair of land, and drop into the main;
Now hills and vales no more distinction know,
And levell’d nature lies oppress’d below;
The most of mortals perish in the flood,
The small remainder dies for want of food.
A mountain of stupendous height there stands
Betwixt the Athenian and Boeotian lands,
The bound of fruitful fields, while fields they were,
But then a field of waters did appear,
Parnassus is its name, whose forky rise
Mounts through the clouds and mates the lofty skies;
High on the summit of this dubious cliff,
Deucalion wafting, moor’d his little skiff;
He with his wife were only left behind
Of perish’d man; they two were human kind.
The mountain nymphs and Themis they adore,
And from her oracles relief implore.
The most upright of mortal men was he;
The most sincere and holy woman, she.
When Jupiter, surveying earth from high,
Beheld it in a lake of water lie,
That where so many millions lately lived,
But two, the best of either sex, survived;
He loosed the northern wind, fierce Boreas flies,
To puff away the clouds and purge the skies;
Serenely while he blows, the vapours driven,
Discover heaven to earth, and earth to heaven.
The billows fall, while Neptune lays his mace
On the rough sea, and smooths its furrow’d face.
Already Triton, at his call, appears
Above the waves, a Tyrian robe he wears,
And in his hand a crooked trumpet bears.
The sovereign bids him peaceful sounds inspire
And give the waves the signal to retire.
His writhen shell he takes, whose narrow vent
Grows by degrees into a large extent,
Then gives it breath; the blast with doubling sound
Runs the wide circuit of the world around;
The sun first heard it, in his early east,
And met the rattling echoes in the west;
The waters, listening to the trumpet’s roar,
Obey the summons, and forsake the shore.
A thin circumference of land appears,
And earth, but not at once, her visage rears,
And peeps upon the seas from upper grounds;
The streams, but just contain’d within their bounds,
By slow degrees into their channels crawl,
And earth increases as the waters fall;
In longer time the tops of trees appear,
Which mud on their dishonour’d branches bear.
At length the world was all restored to view,
But desolate, and of a sickly hue;
Nature beheld herself, and stood aghast,
A dismal desert and a silent waste.
Which when Deucalion, with a piteous look,
Beheld, he wept, and thus to Pyrrha spoke:
“O wife! O sister! O of all thy kind
The best, and only creature left behind,
By kindred, love, and now by dangers join’d;
Of multitudes, who breathed the common air,
We two remain; a species in a pair:
The rest the seas have swallow’d; nor have we
Ev’n of this wretched life a certainty.
The clouds are still above; and while I speak,
A second deluge o’er our heads may break.
Should I be snatch’d from hence, and thou remain,
Without relief, or partner of thy pain,
How couldst thou such a wretched life sustain?
Should I be left, and thou be lost, the sea
That buried her I loved, should bury me.
O could our father his old arts inspire,
And make me heir of his informing fire,
That so I might abolish’d man retrieve,
And perish’d people in new souls might live!
But Heaven is pleased, nor ought we to complain,
That we, the examples of mankind, remain.”
He said: the careful couple join their tears,
And then invoke the gods, with pious prayers.
Thus, in devotion having eased their grief,
From sacred oracles they seek relief,
And to Cephisus’ brook their way pursue;
The stream was troubled, but the ford they knew:
With living waters, in the fountain bred,
They sprinkle first their garments and their head,
Then took the way which to the temple led.
The roofs were all defiled with moss and mire;
The desert altars void of solemn fire.
Before the gradual prostrate they adored;
The pavement kiss’d; and thus the saint implor’d:
“O, righteous Themis, if the powers above
By prayers are bent to pity, and to love;
If human miseries can move their mind;
If yet they can forgive, and yet be kind;
Tell how we may restore, by second birth,
Mankind, and people desolated earth.”
Then thus the gracious goddess, nodding, said:
“Depart, and with your vestments veil your head;
And stooping lowly down, with loosen’d zones,
Throw each behind your backs your mighty mother’s bones.”
Amazed the pair, and mute with wonder, stand,
Till Pyrrha first refused the dire command.
“Forbid it Heaven,” said she, “that I should tear
Those holy relics from the sepulchre!”
They ponder’d the mysterious words again,
For some new sense; and long they sought in vain:
At length Deucalion clear’d his cloudy brow,
And said, “the dark enigma will allow
A meaning, which, if well I understand,
From sacrilege will free the god’s command:
This Earth our mighty mother is, the stones
In her capacious body are her bones:
These we must cast behind.” With hope and fear
The woman did the new solution hear:
The man diffides in his own augury,
And doubts the gods; yet both resolve to try.
Descending from the mount, they first unbind
Their vests, and veil’d, they cast the stones behind:
The stones (a miracle to mortal view,
But long tradition makes it pass for true)
Did first the rigour of their kind expel,
And suppled into softness as they fell;
Then swell’d, and swelling by degrees, grew warm,
And took the rudiments of human form.
Imperfect shapes: in marble such are seen,
When the rude chisel does the man begin;
While yet the roughness of the stone remains,
Without the rising muscles and the veins.
The sappy parts, and next resembling juice,
Were turn’d to moisture, for the body’s use;
Supplying humours, blood, and nourishment;
The rest, too solid to receive a bent,
Converts to bones; and what was once a vein,
Its former name and nature did retain.
By help of power divine, in little space,
What the man threw assumed a manly face,
And what the wife, renew’d the female race.
Hence we derive our nature; born to bear
Laborious life, and harden’d into care.
The rest of animals, from teeming earth
Produced, in various forms received their birth.
The native moisture, in its close retreat,
Digested by the sun’s ethereal heat,
As in a kindly womb, began to breed,
Then swell’d, and quicken’d by the vital seed.
And some in less, and some in longer space,
Were ripen’d into form, and took a several face.
Thus when the Nile from Pharian fields is fled,
And seeks, with ebbing tides, his ancient bed,
The fat manure with heavenly fire is warm’d,
And crusted creatures, as in wombs,
