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Ovid and the Poet of Today
Comments on Ovid's Elegy XIII, Amores, Book I
Drama, Opposition and Conflict
The Poetry Revolt has tried to argue for narrative elements in poems as well as the restoration of sound and movement patterns (see Language Dethroned.) Elegy XIII from Book I of the Amores is a vivid example of narrative skillfully exploited. Ovid provides contrast, drama, and emphatic closure at the end . He makes an exciting drama with a sizable cast of characters, opposing forces, and psychological complexity--out of his reluctance to get out of bed! A new poetics can learn a great deal by examining the methods and devices he uses to achieve this.
Elegy XIII, Book I, "To Aurora"
Now over the Ocean from her older husband comes
the golden one, whose frosty chariot wheels bring day.
Why such a rush, Aurora? Stay: even as the birds (shades
of your son Memnon) commemorate his death each year,
sinking into the flames in ritual self-immolation.
At this moment I delight in lying in the soft arms
of my lady-love, so closely joined at my side.
Now sleep is easy, luxurious, and the air is cool;
the birds sing full-throated, with rippling, liquid trills.
Why do you hurry, unwelcome to men, dismaying to girls?
Pull back those reins, dripping with dew, in your rosy fingers!
Before your rise, the sailor better tracks the stars that guide him;
with you, he wanders lost over the deep, far from land.
When you arrive, the traveler gets up, no matter how exhausted;
the soldier must ready his weapons in savage hands.
First you see to the tillers in the fields, weighed down with their hoes,
you summon the slow oxen, bending them under the yoke.
You rob boys of sleep and hand them over to their teachers,
so their tender skin endures whippings from merciless hands.
You send the unwary guarantor before the courts
where words said only once cost heavy damages.
No weighty reasoning nor pleasing eloquence sways you--
you force both sides to stand new litigation.
You, when women are resting from their labors,
call back the spinners, the wool-workers to their looms.
All this could be endured--except the girls getting up so early!
Who would do this to them? only one who is no longer a girl!
How often I have wished that Night would not yield to you,
that the circling stars not flee before your face;
how often I have wished the wind had cracked your axle,
and that your horses, dragged back, had plunged to their deaths
amid thick cloud! What! Did you never blaze with passion for Cephalus?
Did that worthless, low-born nobody ever make you think twice?
You envy me, but why such a rush? What your black and gloomy son
was to you, this somber hue has imbued your mother heart.
I wish Tithonius were allowed to tell about your many lovers;
no more disgraceful story would be told in heaven.
At daybreak you get away from him, older than you by so long an age:
you step up to the chariot the old man hates to see.
Yet if you were with Cephalus--softly embraced, held fast--
you would cry, "O run slowly, night horses!"
Why should I be punished for loving, because your lover shrivels
with the years? Was it my idea for you to marry an old man?
Consider the sleep your sister the Moon gave her young lover,
Endymion: nor is her beauty second to yours.
The father of the gods himself, so as not to see you so often,
joined two nights in one in his desire.
Finally, I stopped railing. You know she heard me: the sky blushed red.
Nonetheless, the day rose--no later than usual.
--translated by Maryke Cramerus ©2008
A central theme of the Amores is the promise of joyous bliss from the delight of lovers in each other, their playful interaction, and the physical pleasure they give one another. The Ovid of Book I of the Elegies is confident that these delights are natural, morally permissible and achievable in the normal course of events. The poet does not find himself listless, melancholy, or otherwise incapable of enjoying life and its pleasures. He is not doomed to lasting solitude or defeat, but overcomes them with skillful cajolery, deception, and unflagging persistence.
Ovid adds drama to this pursuit of amorous and other enjoyment by setting up obstacles which threaten success: demanding husbands, vigilant chaperones, and dangers such as illness and journeys overseas. In each of the Amores, there is a struggle (or a mock struggle) with an opposing force which must be dealt with.
In Elegy XIII, Ovid follows his typical pattern of devoting almost all of the poem to the threat, giving only four lines to the joys of lingering in bed on a cool morning with his lover. His opponent is familiar to all of us: Aurora or Day, what we might call the workday, which summons us away from sensual pleasure and relaxation to chores, wearisome labor, worry, and strict and punitive taskmasters. He presents Aurora as the orchestrator of the world of work and hardship, and Night as the refuge of the exhausted worker, student, traveler, or soldier.
Conflicting Relationships and Psychological Dynamics
Aurora, the goddess of Dawn, is not a mere personification of these realities. Ovid gives her an eventful history of impulsive, poorly thought-out infatuations and a disappointing marriage, along with a complex psyche driven by uncontrolled passion, inability to think past the moment, envy of others, bitterness at her own aging, and sorrow for the death of her son Memnon. Ovid hints that it is her overwhelming grief that drives her gnawing dissatisfaction, her headlong rush into ill-fated entanglements with young men, and her envy of young men who enjoy youth's pleasures.
He also leaves open the possibility that all of this is the narrator's invention, that he is projecting onto Aurora only his own dissatisfactions as she simply plays out her timeless and unvarying role in the cosmic cycle of night and day.
The narrator repeatedly taunts Aurora about her failures, foolish decisions, advancing age, and much older husband, demanding, with increasing intensity, that she feel ashamed and acknowledge humiliation from her defeats. He implies that the other gods would shun her if the full extent of her folly were known, and that Jove already hates the sight of her. The poem ends with Aurora blushing at the poet's accusations, but bringing day with her chariot just as she always has, forcing the poet and all of us to our labors. His protest has been futile.
The poem's repeated stress on aging points to another source of anger at Aurora. As part of the cycle of night and day, she represents aging itself. Worse, she let slip the opportunity she had to protect her husband, Tithonius, from age when she asked Jove to make him immortal but forgot to ask that he also be made eternally youthful. Ovid's narrator is protesting the loss of youth and the approach of old age that grows closer with each dawn. He demands that time stop in its tracks to preserve the moment of youth and to stall the onset of Tithonius's fate of shriveled decrepitude.
Aurora represents more than the demands of life and its burdens. She embodies the aging mother, less and less responsive to her son's demands to be coddled and given whatever he wants as he approaches adulthood--a parent increasingly insistent that he take on the world of work, cares, and responsibility rather than lolling in bed. The poet responds with the accusations children have made to parents throughout the centuries, "you didn't deal with life that well yourself--who are you to talk?" along with "you, too, have a sexual past, and other follies as well" and "your marriage is dull and your life is boring--don't expect me to live like that."
Ovidian narrators press their immature and unrealistic longings, and reject demands that they tailor their whims and passions to reality. Ovid presents himself as rueful and regretful for this immaturity. He mocks his avid quest for pleasure, as he recognized early on the perils of refusal to be bound by the demands of society and reality. Yet a close reading of the Amores reveals a sustained critique of the Roman concept of Duty and inexorable self-sacrifice. He satirizes the endless fabulae of stern Roman citizens prompt to sacrifice their lives and everything dear to them when the oracles issue their inscrutable edicts, just as he turns away from writing about the Aeneid and feats of arms in favor of Cupid in Elegy I of Book I.
Dialog, Rhetoric, and Social Dynamics
As in so many of his poems, Ovid uses internal monologue-as-dialog as a way to dramatize his thoughts. He conjures up an imagined adversary as a foil for his desires and fears. He infuses inner speech with passion, impetuous exaggeration, and theatrical gesture.
Ovid turns to these scoldings, admonitions, and stinging taunts are to intensify the drama that occurs within the self. He uses exclamations and questions freely in Elegy XIII, along with imperatives, all taunting and provocative:
Why such a rush, Aurora? Stay . . .
Why should I be punished for loving, because your lover shrivels with the years?
Was it my idea for you to marry an old man?
Did you never blaze with passion for Cephalus?
Pull back those reins, dripping with dew
Impassioned questions and fervent imperatives are central to Ovid's method of making poems into dramas of interpersonal confrontation--and eventual reconciliation and reciprocal surrender. In many elegies he uses "why?" both as rhetorical protest and as a way to probe obscure or irrational motivation.
He flings out accusations or derisive descriptions, addressed to Aurora as if she were present, (or, in other elegies, to Corinna or her servant or her husband or Cupid or whoever his imagined interlocutor is in the poem--even to himself when he is bent on self-chastisement). He upbraids Aurora for being demanding, unfeeling, and harsh:
You rob boys of sleep and hand them over to their teachers
Surely Ovid learned a great deal of this in the law courts, both as a law student and afterwards. These rhetorical devices--the derisive question, accusation, outrage, and mockery--are still in use by the lawyers of our own era.
His tone is a unique blend of vehemence, smarting from injustice, and self-mocking bemusement that embraces the claims of both sides in the dispute. This can be seen throughout this elegy, and culminates in the acknowledgment of the rights of both parties in its final lines:
Finally, I stopped railing. You know she heard me: the sky blushed red.
Nonetheless, the day rose--no later than usual.
Shame and humiliation, central themes in the Amores, are both acknowledged and left behind; the demands of life are resisted but prevail. As in so many of the conclusions of the elegies, resentment and tenderness come together in a moment of reconciliation in which all parties' claims are heard and acknowledged.
In addition to the portraits of individuals, interpersonal drama, psychological soundings, and evocation of myth, Ovid never fails to give us a picture of his society not as mere backdrop, but as an active force, infusing the conflicts, themes, and interpersonal dynamics of the poem. In Elegy XIII, the disappointed lovers, grief-stricken mother, spoiled young man demanding his pleasures, and jealous older husband at the crux of the drama are shown buffeted by the currents of social, economic, and military Roman life. I believe that it is not by chance that Ovid's poems juxtapose slaves, street vendors, rich merchants, and wealthy aristocrats, and that he dwells on how they interact and what factors shape their dealings with one another. Ovid was acutely interested in painting his era as well as the individuals that come to such vivid life in his poems.
The elegy to Aurora includes a wonderful panoramic view of Romans engaged in their daily activities:
Before your rise, the sailor better tracks the stars that guide him;
with you, he wanders lost over the deep, far from land.
When you arrive, the traveler gets up, no matter how exhausted;
the soldier must ready his weapons in savage hands.
First you see to the tillers in the fields, weighed down with their hoes,
you summon the slow oxen, bending them under the yoke.
You rob boys of sleep and hand them over to their teachers,
so their tender skin endures whippings from merciless hands.
You send the unwary guarantor before the courts
where words said only once cost heavy damages.
No weighty reasoning nor pleasing eloquence sways you--
you force both sides to stand new litigation.
You, when women are resting from their labors,
call back the spinners, the wool-workers to their looms.
As in so much of Ovid, the dynamic force driving all these activities is a harsh authority prompt to punish and ready to use violence: the soldier, the schoolmaster flogging the boys, and the courts with their heavy fines and penalties. Once again, Ovid protests against the demand for submission and renunciation. In other elegies, he gives his attention to money, commodification, status, and the tyranny of fashion and fads. He focuses on these as powerful and potentially mutilating dynamics that drive social structure, interpersonal interactions, identity, shame, and vulnerable self-regard.
Ovid is known for using vivid description and metaphor to achieve his effects, but they are not found in this poem. Elegy XIII is closer to Whitman in its enumerations of those forced to return to work at dawn, and of the wishes that Ovid has for Aurora's undoing:
How often I have wished that Night would not yield to you,
that the circling stars not flee before your face;
how often I have wished the wind might crack your axle,
and that your horses, dragged back, would plunge to their deaths
The lack of description and striking metaphors is atypical. The one hint of the vivid images more characteristic of Ovid is the opening line, but it relies on striking contrast rather than developed description:
Now over the Ocean from her older husband comes
the golden one, whose frosty chariot wheels bring day.
Conclusion
The poets of the early twenty-first century are drawn to whimsy, self-deprecation, and ironic bemusement. They sometimes appear reluctant to approach Ovid's larger concerns: the harsher dynamics of society, such as violence and commodification, and how these breed humiliation and cruelty. Many of us are hesitant to address these from simple uncertainty on how to go about it.
This is where Ovid is invaluable. He provides us with an example of a whimsical, self-deprecating, and ironic poet who explores these issues in all their depth and complexity. To do so, Ovid uses narrative rife with conflict, dramatized by striking contrasts, extended parallels, and unexpected reversals. His devices include monologue presented as dialog, a rhetoric of invective and confrontation, and a sharply realized social milieu which actively shapes the protagonists and their fates. He is a master of compelling description and metaphor, but he can bring his poems to vivid life without them. Ovid blends playful self-mockery, vehement accusation, psychological penetration, and evocation of milieu. These allow him to probe profound questions of motivation, identity, and deeply human connection which would expand the range and power of today's poetry.
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