5 Lines

For class we chose five lines to present from Ovid's Metamorphoses. I chose lines on p. 374. My lines say:
"No one could catch him; keen to kill himself, he raced up to Parnassus' peak--and leaped down from a cliff. Apollo, pitying my brother, made of him a bird with wings that sprouted suddenly"



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These five lines seemed to condense the theme of the Metamorphoses. In this short passage, there is a physical metamorphosis--a human is changed into a bird. But there is also another central theme that appears in the book and in these lines. Beside the physical change there is also another change. A suicidal man is now a bird that has the freedom of the sky. At the beginning there is misery and distress, yet, now, there is change and things may or may not be better, they are just different. I think that Ovid shows this a lot. There is not clear good and bad in all of the stories. There is change. Ovid seems to say that the black-and-white of "good" and "bad" may not actually be very prominent in day-to-day life. What is always present is change. Good changes to bad, bad changes to good, the only constant is change.