beat up the...

The dawn is beat up by the horses of Phoebus, who rides the sun across the sky every day in his chariot, called by Ovid the burning axle-tree. There is another echo from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the story of Niobe: "With even surface, far extending round, / Beaten and level'd, while it daily feels / The trampling horse, and chariot's grinding wheels."

reference topics