As her parting shot against the lover-poet's verse, her very epitaph, an
elegiac couplet, alludes to the function of elegy as a funerary genre and shows her own facility with the Alexandrian style to which the lover-poet aspires.
The "foot" (pedem) stolen by the god of love is the length of meter that transformed the intended poem from epic hexameter to
elegiac couplet. Ovid was now to write about love, not war.
elegy Greek elegeia, elegeion
elegiac couplet, elegy, a derivative of elegos song accompanied by the flute
All in all, it contains 92 poems called "elegies," partly because of their subject matter and tonality and partly because of their form, the so-called
elegiac couplet, a combination of hexametric and pentametric lines that was the main poetic medium of the time.
Roman poet Ovid was halfway through the Fasti--conceived as 12 books of
elegiac couplets, one for each month in the Roman calendar and its festivals--when the emperor Augustus abruptly drove him out of Rome to the edge of the empire.
The most common meters are
elegiac couplets, Sapphic and Alcaic stanzas, and dactylic hexameters.
William's teacher, Ralph of Dunstable, had surprisingly agreed to turn his pupil's work into Latin
elegiac couplets. Otherwise, the preaching tour of Wales by Amphibalus was considered an anachronism, and many quotations were noted from the Acts of the Apostles.