Pomona

Pomona belongs to the race of wood-nymphs whose whole passion is cultivation: pruning, grafting, and coaxing fruit from reluctant boughs. Her flaw is not coldness but absorption — she reads desire as distraction, and every wooer at her wall becomes another trespass on her work. Vertumnus, god of seasons and shifting shapes, must therefore court her sideways, slipping past her defenses in borrowed forms. Their courtship anchors the poem's Italian book, where Ovid turns from Greek myth toward the origins of Rome's own landscape.