Kevin Ohi
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823294626
- eISBN:
- 9780823297252
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823294626.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The beginning of Ovid’s Metamorphoses raises the question of inception in many different ways. As is well known, the poem itself becomes an object of textual controversy in its second line. In ...
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The beginning of Ovid’s Metamorphoses raises the question of inception in many different ways. As is well known, the poem itself becomes an object of textual controversy in its second line. In question is a pronoun (them), which, depending on its case, refers either to Ovid’s verse or to the forms it depicts. The uncertainty is fitting: Enjambment makes it initially seem as if the poem invoked its own originality; only in the second line, when a seeming noun retrospectively becomes an adjective, does the invocation become one to unnamed gods. In the second line, too, after a notable feint, Ovid, who, in the Amores, had invented the limping meter of elegiac couplets, returns to the dactylic hexameter of epic. Such play makes explicit that creation and writing are forms of metamorphosis; past the first two lines, the poem turns to repeated, sometimes mutually cancelling, accounts of the world’s creation. The chapter pursues the consequences of this structure of inception for the songs of Orpheus in Book X, focusing on Orpheus’s foundational place for male same-sex desire, and on recurrent images of stone—which links Book X’s account of desire and loss to the opening paradoxes of creation and inception.Less
The beginning of Ovid’s Metamorphoses raises the question of inception in many different ways. As is well known, the poem itself becomes an object of textual controversy in its second line. In question is a pronoun (them), which, depending on its case, refers either to Ovid’s verse or to the forms it depicts. The uncertainty is fitting: Enjambment makes it initially seem as if the poem invoked its own originality; only in the second line, when a seeming noun retrospectively becomes an adjective, does the invocation become one to unnamed gods. In the second line, too, after a notable feint, Ovid, who, in the Amores, had invented the limping meter of elegiac couplets, returns to the dactylic hexameter of epic. Such play makes explicit that creation and writing are forms of metamorphosis; past the first two lines, the poem turns to repeated, sometimes mutually cancelling, accounts of the world’s creation. The chapter pursues the consequences of this structure of inception for the songs of Orpheus in Book X, focusing on Orpheus’s foundational place for male same-sex desire, and on recurrent images of stone—which links Book X’s account of desire and loss to the opening paradoxes of creation and inception.
