In my previous post, I presented two standard interpretations of the fable of the hawk and the nightingale in Hesiod’s 8th-century B.C. poem Works and Days. Today, I will offer my own novel interpretation of this fable. Specifically, what if the fable is an allegory about eternal conflict between making a living and producing lasting art, a conflict that describes the arc of Hesiod’s own life and work, the daily toil that kept him from perfecting and devoting himself to his poetic craft. For starters, Works and Days begins with a hymnic invocation to the Muses calling on them to sing of their father Zeus (lines 1-11), so perhaps the nightingale represents these “Pierian Muses.” (line 1) But what does the hawk represent? According to the introduction to my old edition of Works and Days (pp. 14-15), Hesiod was a promising poet in his youth, but he had to go back to farming after he had some “legal troubles” with his brother, and then “the daily grind [of farming for a living] almost obscured his talents forever …” So, maybe the hawk represents the sands of time. We have only a limited amount of time to make our mark on the world. We don’t know when our time will come–when the hawk of death will swoop us away–but in the meantime we can either make a living or we can strive to create great art like Homer or Hesiod in order to be remembered after we leave the scene. Like the nightingale clutched in the talons of the hawk, we cannot escape our mortality; our time to shine is fleeting …