Explain the central theme of the poem The Metamorphoses.

The major theme of Ovid's Metamorphoses is metamorphosis itself. "I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms," the poet declares in the first sentence of the poem. Throughout the twelve thousand lines of the Metamorphoses, Ovid describes how change continually occurs in the universe; how the gods, out of revenge or capricious desires, endlessly exert their transformative powers on the world. Metamorphosis is the recurring theme throughout all the stories in the Metamorphoses, and it is the theme that artists and writers have drawn from Ovid over the centuries.