![]() ![]() In one continuous song from nature’s firstĪnd indeed Ovid’s tale takes us up to the point where Julius Caeser was deified in 42 BC after his assassination. You Gods, who have yourself wrought every change. The poem starts off explicitly outlining Ovid’s intention: It is also a story about the tension between good and ‘the despicable’ (either godly or human.) It’s always there bubbling underneath the surface as a life force. ![]() ![]() Metamorphoses, as Ted Hughes points out in his introduction of his fantastic reworking of the tale Tales From Ovid, i s a poem about ‘passion’ (ix), passion in its extreme- where passion ‘combusts, or levitates or mutates into the experience of the supernatural’ and each myth is reinvigorated and explored through that sense of passion. With great beauty and vigour the text flings you into the ‘overworld and underworld’ (vii) of all creation and explores both Greek and Roman myth reinvigorating the old tales with humour, pathos and cheer and all through the notion of metamorphoses. It forms a vaste canvas where mortals intertwine with Gods and are transformed. Completed in 8 AD by Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid to you and me) Metamorphoses is first and foremost an extended narrative poem about change change of all kinds: historical, religious (from the Roman multi-God form of worship to the birth of Christ within the Roman Empire) from human to inanimate object from human to animate object from the mythic to the Christian. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |