Pyramus and Thisbe

The action of Pyramus and Thisbe is driven not by a human character, but by an inanimate obstacle: a wall. While English translations sometimes muddle the details (as this episode’s translator, A. D. Melville, does in Lines 12-13), the Latin text is clear: the shared wall is not structural. The reader is not meant to imagine that Pyramus and Thisbe’s bedrooms are directly adjacent to each other; rather this is a garden wall, a dividing line between two estates. But unlike Robert Frost’s more neighborly partition (See the Study Guide of Robert Frost’s Mending Wall), Ovid’s wall symbolizes not only the opposition between Pyramus and Thisbe’s fathers, but also their obstruction of their marriage. With this barrier, the owners of the homesteads have deliberately separated their households—and their inhabitants—both physically and metaphorically.

In this light, the crack in the wall symbolizes Pyramus and Thisbe’s ability to find common ground, even in the smallest of ways. An outside observer—the fathers, perhaps—would see the wall’s hole as a flaw. Because of the hole, the wall cannot fulfill its intended function. But the lovers not only find the wall sympathetic; despite its flaws, they personify it. They plead with the wall like a living person, revealing love’s power to draw high emotion out of lovers—and perhaps make them a little ridiculous.