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How Ivory and Water responds to Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Ovid is considered one of the greatest poets and his works continue to inspire modern
poetry and poets. Metamorphoses is a major work by the poet which is based on the themes of
change and transformation. Michael Longley, in an interview1, mentions how he is inspired by
Ovid and how he is obsessed with the way things change over time. The paper investigates how
Longley’s “Ivory and Water” responds to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The keynote of Metamorphoses written by the Roman poet Ovid is the variety in subject
matter and the tonality. The narrative epic poem is inspired by the creation of the world 2. The
model of Ovid's Metamorphoses belongs to the Hellenistic context and a genre of poems known
as collective poems. Ovid treats twenty-one stories in Metamorphoses, and his style of poetry is
far more ambitious than seen in any poetry before 3. It remains one of the best known classical
works from medieval writers. Metamorphoses describe the creation and history of the world and
are based on Greek mythology. There is some sort of transformation within each story that links
them together. Ovid deals with how the original formless matter gradually changes into various
shapes that developed the visible world in the first few hundred lines of the poem. Later he
focuses on human beings and How the forms changed into new diverse bodies of plants, animals,
rocks, flowers, constellations and so on.4 In his poem, Ovid finds several matters for hundreds of
metamorphoses.
1 Peter McDonald, An Interview with Michael Longley (1998),
< http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record8921.html?id=12172>
2 Galinsky, p.1.
3 Galinsky, p.2.
4 Anderson, p.7.

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