 Hesiod's handling of the dactylic hexameter was not as masterful or fluent as Homer's and one modern scholar refers to his "hobnailed hexameters".His use of language and meter in "Works and Days" and "Theogony" distinguishes him also from the author of the "Shield of Heracles".All three poets, for example, employed digamma inconsistently, sometimes allowing it to affect syllable length and meter, sometimes not.