Category: Poems

The following is my brief adaptation of a much longer piece, a translation of a poem in Ovid’s Metamorphoses by the poet and classicist Ted Hughes. Hughes’s book, Tales from Ovid, is a treasure, BUT since you’re unlikely ever to open it, I’ve taken the liberty of bringing to you, with a debt to Hughes, an allegory that may be even more relevant to our time than it was to Ovid’s. Thus. . .

Phaethon’s Fall

Phaethon importuned his father, Helios, charioteer of the Sun,
To give him the reins of the light-giving chariot
To drive across the sky for a day.
Helios, bound by an ill-considered oath,
With grim reluctance had to yield to the request.

The sky-horses, sensing weakness,
Careened wildly, and, unleashed,
Plunged downward,
Scorching the earth, boiling the seas.

Earth, in agony, cried out
To all-powerful Zeus, who
Struck down rash Phaethon with a thunderbolt.

Phaethon, consumed by flame,
Lived not long enough to regret his error.