Hesiod's "The Works and Days": Title
From Prufrock:
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
"The Works and Days":
Beware of the month Lenaion, bad days,
that would take the skin off
an ox; beware of it, and the frosts, which,
as Boreas,
the north wind, blows over the land, cruelly develop;
he gets his breath and rises on the open water
by horse-breeding
Thrace, and blows, and the earth
and the forest groan, as many
oaks with sweeping foliage, many solid fir trees
along the slopes of the mountains his force bends
against the prospering
earth, and all the innumerable forest
is loud with him.
The beasts shiver and put their tails
between their legs, even
those with thick furry coats to cover their hides,
the cold winds
blow through the furs of even these, for all
their thickness.
The wind goes through the hide of an ox,
it will not stop him;
it goes through a goatskin, that is fine-haired;
but not even Boreas'
force can blow through a sheepskin to any degree,
for the thick fleece
holds him out. It does bend the old man
like a wheel's timber.
It does not blow through the soft skin
of a young maiden
who keeps her place inside the house
by her loving mother
and is not yet initiated in the mysteries of Aphrodite
the golden, who, washing her smooth skin carefully,
and anointing it
with oil, then goes to bed, closeted
in an inside chamber
on a winter's day
that time when old No-Bones the polyp
gnaws his own foot in his fireless house,
that gloomy habitat,
for the sun does not now point him out any range
to make for
but is making his turns in the countryside
and population of dusky
men, and is dull to shed his light
upon Hellenic peoples.
Then all the sleepers in the forest,
whether horned or hornless,
teeth miserably chattering, flee away
through the mountainous
woods, and in the minds of all
there is one wish only,
the thought of finding shelter, getting behind
dense coverts
and the hollow of the rock; then like
the three-footed individual
with the broken back, and head over, and eyes
on the ground beneath
so doubled, trying to escape the white snow,
all go wandering.
Explanation
The Allusion obviously is to the title of the poem, so there is no explanation needed.
