creation

Before the seas and lands had been created,

before the sky that covers everything,

Nature displayed a single aspect only

throughout the cosmos; Chaos was its name,

a shapeless, unwrought mass of inert bulk

and nothing more, with the discordant seeds

of disconnected elements all heaped

together in anarchic disarray.

The sun as yet did not light up the earth,

nor did the crescent moon renew her horns,

nor was the earth suspended in midair,

balanced by her own weight, nor did the ocean

extend her arms to the margins of the land.

Although the land and sea and air were present,

land was unstable, the sea unfit for swimming,

and air lacked light; shapes shifted constantly,

and all things were at odds with one another,

for in a single mass cold strove with warm,

wet was opposed to dry and soft to hard,

and weightlessness to matter having weight.

Some god (or kinder nature) settled this

dispute by separating earth from heaven,

and then by separating sea from earth

and fluid aether from the denser air;

and after these were separated out

and liberated from the primal heap,

he bound the disentangled elements

each in its place and all in harmony.

from Ovid's Metamorphoses