IN the Metamorphoses, change descends swiftly, a making, or rather remaking, unbound by material limits and untroubled by the suffering of those it transforms. Whether in service of divine desire or as a means of eluding it, such metamorphosis is as immediate as it is inexorable. By contrast, human making is slow, and in Ovid's poem, it is most often engendered through the mediating power of the gods. This distinction is present in book 1 where the creation of the world is envisioned as Jove disentangling chaos, an admixture of contradictory forces parted and “set in order straight” through an act of divine perception and will. When an ancient flood later destroys humanity in the wake of Jove's anger, remaking the race falls to the Noah-like survivor, Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha. As instructed by Themis, they toss stones over their shoulders, which then begin “to warre both soft and smoothe and shortly afterwarde / To winne therwith a better shape.”

The resulting metamorphosis is in marked contrast to the immediacy of that enacted by the gods: “For at the first their shape was such, as in a certain sort / Resembled man, but of the right and perfect shape came short. / Even like to Marble ymages new drawne and roughly wrought, / Before the Carver by his Arte to purpose hath them brought.” Though initially insufficient in form, Deucalion and Pyrrha's softened stones serve to repopulate the earth. Emphasizing the role of divine will in this process, the narrator concludes: “Thus by the mightie power of God ere lenger time was past, / The mankind was restorde by stones the which a man did cast.”