In all this myth, it will be seen, Jupiter may very properly be considered as a personification of the elemental strife that drowned a guilty world. Deucalion, warned, by his father, of the coming deluge, thereupon made himself an ark or skiff, and, putting provisions into it, entered it with his wife, Pyrrha. The whole earth is then overspread with the flood of waters, and all animal life perishes, except Deucalion and his wife. The northern breath that freezes floods, Jove binds, With all the race of cloud-dispelling winds: The south he loosed, who night and horror brings, And fogs are shaken from his flaggy wings. From his divided beard two streams he pours; His head and rheumy eyes distil in showers. The skies, from pole to pole, with peals resound; And showers enlarged come pouring on the ground. Nor from his patrimonial heaven alone Is Jove content to pour his vengeance down: Aid from his brother of the seas he craves, To help him with auxiliary waves. The watery tyrant calls his brooks and floods, Who roll from mossy caves, their moist abodes, And with perpetual urns his palace fill; To whom, in brief, he thus imparts his will: Small exhortation needs; your powers employ, And this bad world (so Jove requires) destroy. Let loose the reins to all your watery store; Bear down the dams and open every door." The floods, by nature enemies to land, And proudly swelling with their new command, Remove the living stones that stopped their way, And, gushing from their source, augment the sea. Then with his mace their monarch struck the ground: With inward trembling Earth received the wound, And rising stream a ready passage found. The expanded waters gather on the plain, They float the fields and overtop the grain; Then, rushing onward, with a sweepy sway, Bear flocks and folds and laboring hinds away. Nor safe their dwellings were; for, sapped by floods, Their houses fell upon their household gods. The solid hills, too strongly built to fall, High o'er their heads behold a watery wall. Now seas and earth were in confusion lost-- A world of waters, and without a coast. One climbs a cliff; one in his boat is borne, And ploughs above where late he sowed his corn. Others o'er chimney-tops and turrets row, And drop their anchors on the meads below; Or, downward driven, they bruise the tender vine, Or, tossed aloft, are hurled against a pine. And where of late the kids had cropped the grass, The monsters of the deep now take their place. Insulting Ner'e-ids on the cities ride, And wondering dolphins o'er the palace glide. On leaves and masts of mighty oaks they browse, And their broad fins entangle in the boughs.