When comparing it to other well-known creation stories, after  reading the Creation, it is extremely apparent that the story's theme falls into stark contrast with its title–the poem aligns more closely to the idea of “separation.” Genesis’s introduction of the universe resembles the creation of a painting wherein the Creation’s story resembles the creation of a statue. Genesis establishes the world as a blank canvas–darkness–in which God paints the universe with light. As Bob Ross starts his pieces with a “titanium white” backwash then goes in to block out the colors of the sky, the ocean, and the land, God created the world within the bounds of his own vision. Similarly to Ovid’s rendition, the details such as the trees and the birds are secondary. As Ross narrates his painting process of trees and fruit, He declares “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” One by one the Earth’s attributes were painted in, each created in the eyes of the sole divine entity. 

     

Barring the end result: the sky, oceans, land, humans, and animals, Ovid’s Creation has little in common with its older counterpart. As was previously established, this rendition reflects separation rather than formation and thus gives less credit to the divine entity who constructed the world but more to the potential of the ingredients he started out with. As Head-Royce alum Carter Roberts phrased it in his contextual summary of the Creation, “the universe [was] created through a sequence of changes rather than being created out of nothing.” Instead of a blank canvas, the “rudis indigestaque” (confused mass) is the slab of stone a statue is created from. The god who created the world slowly chipped away at the mass to form it into an orb. He separated the heavens from the air, the hot from the cold, and the heavy from the light. Although he isn’t acknowledged as “The Creator” as God is in Christianity and Judaism, Ovid’s creator of the world sculpted right from wrong and instilled order on our planet. 

 

Thus metamorphosis starts as the invention of a new ideology–one that happens to be closer to scientific notions such as the Big Bang Theory. Through the idea of separation, Ovid sets the stage for a 15-book masterpiece characterized by transformation: in this instance from confusion to structure.