Classic Poem

" WORKS AND Days . "

Beware the January month; beware
Those hurtful days, that keenly-piercing air
Which flays the steers, while frosts their horrors cast,
Congeal the ground and sharpen every blast.
From Thracia's courser-teaming region sweeps
The Northern wind and breathing on the deeps
Heaves wide the troubled surge; earth echoing roars
From the deep forests and the sea-beat shores.
He from the mountain-top with shattering stroke
Bends the broad pine and many a branching oak
Hurls thwart the glen: while sudden from on high,
With headlong fury rushing down the sky,
The whirlwind stoops to earth, then deepening round
Swells the loud storm and all the boundless woods resound.
The beasts their cowering tails with trembling fold,
And shrink and shudder at the gusty cold.
Thick is the hairy coat, the shaggy skin,
But that all-chilling breath shall pierce within.
Not his rough hide can then the ox avail,
The long-haired goat defenceless feels the gale;
Yet vain the North-wind's rushing strength to wound
The flock, with sheltering fleeces fenced around.
The aged man inclines his bowed form,
But safe the tender virgin from the storm.
She strange to lovely Venus' mystic joys
Beneath her mother's roof her hours employs.
Around her nightly flows the tepid wave,
And shining oils in liquid fragrance lave
Her yielding limbs; thus pillowed to repose
In her soft chamber, while the tempest blows.
Now gnaws the boneless polypus his feet,
Starved midst bleak rocks, his desolate retreat:
For now no more the sun's reflected ray
Thro waves transparent guides him to his prey.
Over tawny Afric rolls his bright career
And slowly gilds the Grecian hemisphere.
And now the horned and unhorned kind,
Whose lair is in the wood, sore-famisht grind
Their sounding jaws, and frozen and quaking fly
Where oaks the mountain dells imbranch on high;
They seek to couch in thickets of the glen,
Or lurk deep-sheltered in the rocky den.
Like aged men who propt on crutches tread
Tottering, with broken strength and stooping head,
So move the beasts of earth; and creeping low
Shun the white flakes and dread the drifting snow!