Form
The poem is Ovid's first attempt at didactic elegy. This poetic genre, perfected by Ovid in his Ars Amatoria, was a curious amalgam of the moralizing and pedagogical tone of didactic poetry and the frivolous subject matter common to Latin elegiac. In the earliest known example of didactic poetry, Works and Days, the Greek poet Hesiod admonishes a dissolute brother to lead a life of honest labor. Centuries later in 29 BC, the Roman poet Vergil, writing in Latin while taking his inspiration in part from Hesiod, published the Georgics, a work whose ostensible purpose was to provide advice on agriculture. Ovid, writing a generation later for an audience to whom the Georgics were well known, used Vergil's sober language to instruct girls on "what care can enhance your looks, and how your beauty may be preserved". Rather than using the dactylic hexameters of Hesiod and Vergil, Ovid casts his advice in elegiac couplets, the traditional meter of love poetry. The contrast of serious tone and light-hearted meter transforms the Medicamina Faciei Femineae into a parody of Vergil's Georgics.
Read more about this topic: Medicamina Faciei Femineae
Famous quotes containing the word form:
“The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer ... form the great body of the people of the United States, they are the bone and sinew of the countrymen who love liberty and desire nothing but equal rights and equal laws.”
—Andrew Jackson (17671845)
“In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each others affairs, who come out together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.”
—Cyril Connolly (19031974)
“Shopping seemed to take an entirely too important place in womens lives. You never saw men milling around in mens departments. They made quick work of it. I used to wonder if shopping was a form of escape for women who had no worthwhile interests.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877?)