The Metamorphoses of Aura in Ovid and Arnaut Daniel

In this paper, the author considers the origins of the rhyme, -aura, which has played an important role in Western poetry. Numerous studies have addressed questions pertaining to the history of aura in general, but none have focused on the matter of aura specifically as a rhyme. Within this narrower focus, the history of the aura-rhyme is shown to center on one critical moment, in which the aura-pun in Ovid's Metamorphoses is transformed into the aura-rhyme in Arnaut Daniel's song "En cest sonet." Through a comparative reading of these two texts, conclusions are drawn regarding the relation of puns to rhymes, nouns to names, and the problems of isolating the origin of a rhyme historically.