Ovid: Pyramus and Thisbe - Walls

As a poet, Ovid uses a plethora of rhetorical devices but also symbolism. One of the large symbols in Pyramus and Thisbe are walls.

The one literal wall in lines 55-104 is the wall that separates Pyramus and Thisbe's home. This wall separates them yet brings them together as well. The wall is a physical barrier to them, yet even the lovers acknowledge that it is because of this wall and the split in it that their words and breaths can cross to each other. Irony. :)

A metaphorical wall is their parents' refusal to allow them to marry. It is a clear obstacle towards their love, and in order to cross over it, they decide to run away. However, it seems that running away has only created more obstructions between them, in the form of the lioness - it is safe to assume that things do not bode well for this couple when a lioness enters the picture. She is yet another wall between them.

Ovid: Pyramus and Thisbe - Rhetorical Devices

Poetry's never complete without rhetorical devices, and Ovid throws plenty at his reader in the first several lines in Pyramas and Thisbe.

One that shows itself immediately is a chiasmus. Ovid describes Pyramus and Thisbe as iuvenum pulcherrimus alter | altera...praelata puellis - "one the most handsome of all the young men, the other the most preferred of all the girls."

A second one is a rhetorical question inserted almost randomly in a long sentence. While talking about the crack in the wall that no one had noticed since the wall was built, Ovid asks quid non sentis amor? - "What does love not notice?" It is clearly a rhetorical question because nowhere does Ovid imply that he actually wants or needs an answer.

Yet another rhetorical device that follows the last one is personification. Ovid addresses the wall as he says primi vidistis amantes, et voics fecistis iter - "You saw these lovers first, and you created a pathway for speech." Walls neither see nor create "pathways for speech." Ovid is giving the wall anthropomorphic qualities.