From foot to Muse: metapoetic feet as structural devices in Ovid’s Amores

From foot to Muse: metapoetic feet as structural devices in Ovid’s Amores

Scholars have long noted the metapoetic value of pes in the Amores, especially its programmatic significance in poems 1.1 and 3.1 (see e.g., McKeown 1987-98). Wordplay involving pes appears elsewhere in Latin poetry (Ferriss 2009; Henkel 2014; Hinds 1985), but most engagement with these puns remains brief and superficial. I demonstrate that Ovid’s elegiac feet perform an essential structural function within the collection: carefully placed metapoetic indices consistently activate pes as both a metrical and embodied metaphor that structures a narrative transformation in the poet’s volition and generic expertise.

First, I show that the strong signposting of the metrical pes in Amores 1.1 validates metapoetic readings of seemingly denotative pedes. It establishes the elegiac couplet as the perfect form for this poetry (Waterhouse 2008), whose apparent lack is both generically appropriate and thematically productive (Oliensis 2019; cf. Ferriss 2009 on invective). The collection’s opening poem not only destabilizes the relationship between verse form and content, but establishes the pes itself as an index of the poet’s confidence in elegy. The theft of the pes renders him—as he frames it—a forced and inexpert participant in the genre.

Second, I demonstrate how metapoetic readings of pes are authorized by surrounding context and structure the development of Ovid’s elegiac persona. In 1.14.7-8, when the puella’s hair is compared to a spider’s web, the lexicon of weaving (deducit, nectit) and literary critical terms (gracili, leve opus) render the spider’s pes irresistibly metrical, in a poem where the amator plays a game of both elegiac and imperial domination (Pandey 2018) with enthusiasm and skill. At 2.17.19-22, where Vulcan’s limping (obliquo pede) is explicitly linked to the imbalance of elegiac meter (carminis hoc ipsum genus impar), the amator now emphasizes that this meter is joined apte (21), a stark shift from his insistence in poem 1.1 that his materia was ill-fitted to lighter verse (nec…numeris leuioribus apta, 19).

The amator’s developing expertise in encountering generic obstacles (e.g. the doorman at 1.6; the river at 3.6) is also focalized through pes: as his confidence in elegiac convention grows, he transforms from a student learning to keep his pedes inoffensos (1.6.8) to a generic expert presenting a mythological exemplum of a barefoot woman (nudo pede, 3.6.50). In these ways, the appearance of pedes structures his movement from stumbling novice to an expert confident in the slender aesthetics of his craft. This development is reified in the personification of limping Elegy in the pes-heavy 3.1 (Bem 2006; Dangel 2009), where the poet’s renewal of commitment to the genre coincides with a transition to the past tense when discussing education in elegy—now the impercussos pedes are a skill not actively being learned (as in 1.6), but already taught (didicit, 52). The carefully structured iterations of pes throughout the Amores mark out a clear path for the poet’s progress from novice to expert, proving that the metapoetic foot is more than a passing joke.