The Art of Love

The Art of Love consists of three books of around 700 to 800 lines each, with Book 3 slightly shorter than the other two. At the ends of Books 2 and 3, Ovid includes his name to designate the end of his advice for men and women, respectively.

The Latin original translation of The Art of Love is written in elegiac couplets, or one line of dactylic hexameter followed by one line of dactylic pentameter. A dactyl is a metric foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones; hexameter means there are six metric feet in a line, and pentameter means there are five. The couplets have enjambment within them, but not between them. This means that sentences can continue into the second line of a couplet, but sentences don’t continue into a new couplet. These are now referred to as Ovidian couplets, due to his famous usage of them. Even within the poem, Ovid remarks on his use of form: “[T]he Muse, on couplets borne” (Book 1, Line 263). This is evidence that his poem is about the Art of Writing as much as the art of love.

Latin poetry did not use rhymes as part of its form; complexity was added through patterns of similarly conjugated and declined words instead.

English translations tend to use iambic rather than dactylic meter, or metric feet of one stressed and one unstressed syllable. Like this translation, they also sometimes use rhymes to convey the effect of Ovid’s couplets to an English speaker. Ovid’s stanza breaks also vary depending on the English translation (the original Latin would not have included stanza or line breaks, but would have simply been written as a block of text.