The proem of Ovid's metamorphoses is a masterpiece writ small, a striking counterpoint to a very long poem.  My point of departure is the unexpected ambiguity in the phrasing of the opening (enjambed) line of the poem.  The first four words form an autonomous unit.  Translated literally, "In nova fert animus" means "My mind carries me onto new things."  This could mean that the narrator Ovid is declaring his subject matter, or, more likely, the novelty and originality of his undertaking.  In the second half of the line the syntactic and semantic structure of the sentence changes, yielding a different sense: "My mind carries (or moves) me to tell of forms changed into new bodies."  In the process of reading this sentence, one realizes that the initial interpretation of the first half-line was based on a misunderstanding of word-order.  What seemed to have been a programmatic statement turns out to be part of another statement declaring the poem's central theme.  The reader is constantly compelled to revise his or her understanding of what the opening sentence means.