The Four Ages described in Ted Hughes’ muscular re-telling of Ovid’s tales, begins with the Golden Age when humanity knew how to behave because it hadn’t strayed too far from the source. Â
The final age is of iron, not in the sense of Iron Age technology, but in the sense of behaving only in one’s own interests. I leave it to the reader to decide if there are echoes of this in the daily news. Personally, I believe we are half Golden, half Iron, and that many of the tensions of the world are in deciding which way we want to go.Â
Love that image – though hope it doesn’t prove true – of qualities of goodness going ‘up like a mist, a morning sigh off a graveyard’.Â
Fully recommend Hughes punchy, pithy story-telling, it’s a short, gripping, memorable read.
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Source: Ted Hughes, ‘Creation; Four Ages; Flood; Lycaon’, Tales from Ovid (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 11
Photo credit: cocoparisienne at pixabay
Last comes the Age of Iron.
And the day of Evil dawns.
Modesty,
Loyalty,
Truth,
Go up like a mist – a morning sigh off a graveyard.
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Snares, tricks, plots come hurrying
Out of their dens in the atom.
Violence is an extrapolation
Of the cutting edge
Into the orbit of the smile.
Now comes the love of gain – a new god
Made out of the shadow
Of all the others. A god who peers
Grinning from the roots of the eye-teeth.Â
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