The metaliterary comment revisits and reverses the opening scene of Ovid’s earlier Amores, where the god Cupid steals a foot from the second line of his projected epic and thereby sets him on an elegiac course ( Amores 1.1.1-4). The novelty of the poem’s subject-matter is complemented by the poet’s new excursion into hexameter verse, a metrical innovation underscored in the second line’s parenthetical comment crediting the gods with transforming not only the changed forms which constitute the poem’s subject matter, but also Ovid’s verse form itself, since they have metamorphosed his poetry from elegiac verse into epic. 1.1), which can be read autonomously to mean ‘my inspiration bears on to new things’. 1.1-4) a change of meter, from the elegiac couplets of his previous poetry to epic hexameters, and of inspiration, from Cupid to the whole divine pantheon and he comments on his innovation in the opening words, in noua fert animus ( Met.
Ovid announces in the proem of his epic ( Met.
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