The deed is ready to hand,
Yet holding my peace is the best, for well thou lovest the land:
And thou lovest thy life moreover, and the peace of thy
youthful days,
And why should the full-fed feaster his hand to the rye-bread raise?
Yet they say that Sigmund begat thee and he looked to fashion a man.
Fear nought; he lieth quiet in his mound by the sea-waves wan.
and Sigurd cries back--
Tell me, thou Master of Masters, what deed is the deed I
shall do?
Nor mock thou the son of Sigmund lest the day of his
birth thou rue.
In the treatment of the poem throughout, however, the quality that is
predominant may be most fittingly described as magnificence of
imagination. This is, of course, a thing quite distinct from mere
magnificence of phrase. Not only is the utterance splendid, but the
thing uttered and the thing suggested are splendid too. The voices
are indeed tremendous, but that is because they are the voices of
tremendous people. We feel always that we are moving among a
humanity not in any way idealized, but framed in the proportions of
giants, purged of everything inessential and tautened in all its
sinews. And when the spirits of these people are drawn up to some
unwonted height of emotional intensity the result is a cry from a
world the knowledge of which moves us to a heroic hope for our race.
The grief of Gudrun over Sigurd dead, with the wonderful refrain
interwoven by the narrator, is a grief that in itself is a triumph
over any blows that destiny can inflict. Once man can sorrow in this
fashion, we feel he has conquered his fate. And the death-song of
Gunnar is yet more magnificent. The poet who wrote that wonderful
chant of man in the face of death has fathomed the very depths of
song-craft. Readers who know Morris's poetry will forgive me for
taking them through these lines once again--
So perished the Gap of the Gaping, and the cold sea
swayed and sang,
And the wind came down on the waters, and the beaten
rock-walls rang;
There the Sun from the south came shining, and the
Starry Host stood round,
And the wandering Moon of the heavens his habitation
found;
And they knew not why they were gathered, nor the
deeds of their shaping they knew:
But lo, Mid-Earth the Noble 'neath their might and their
glory grew,
And the grass spread over its face, and the Night and the
Day were born,
And it cried on the Death in the even, and it cried on the
Life in the morn;
Yet it waxed and waxed, and knew not, and it lived and
had not learned;
And where were the Framers that framed, and the Soul
and the Might that had yearned?
On the Thrones are the Powers that fashioned, and they
name the Night and the Day,
And the tide of the Moon's increasing, and the tide of his
waning away;
And they name the years for the story; and the Lands
they change and change,
The great and the mean and the little, that this unto that
may be strange:
They met, and they fashioned dwellings, and the House
of Glory they built;
They met, and they fashioned the Dwarf-kind, and the
Gold and the Gifts and the Guilt.
There were twain, and they went upon earth, and were
speechless unmighty and wan;
They were hopeless, deathless, lifeless, and the Mighty
named them Man;
Then they gave them speech and power, and they gave
them colour and breath;
And deeds and the hope they gave them, and they gave
them Life and Death;
Yea, hope, as the hope of the Framers; yea, might, as the
Fashioners had,
Till they wrought, and rejoiced in their bodies, and saw
their sons and were glad:
And they changed their lives and departed, and came back
as the leaves of the trees
Come back and increase in the summer:--and I, I, I am
of these;
And I know of Them that have fashioned, and the deeds
that have blossomed and grow;
But nought of the God's repentance, or the God's undoing
I know.
No more striking example of the meaning of personality in poetry
could well be found than in a comparison between this song and the
famous second chorus of Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon," which had
been published ten years earlier. Superficially there is a kinship
both of substance and music, but superficially only. A moderately
sensitive ear will immediately catch the difference in the swell of
the lines, and the substance is alike just as a landscape of Turner
is like one of Corot's--they are both landscapes.
The imaginative and moral atmosphere of Sigurd is that of the
northern peoples. The figures of the story are giants and move along
their lives as such, but there is always behind them the mute shadow
of a yet greater immensity, the fate that reveals itself through no
oracles. At the moments of their most glorious victories and
sweetest attainment, these men and women, Sigurd and Gunnar and
Brynhild and Gudrun and their fellows, are more or less consciously
in the presence of the end that makes neither presage nor promise.
The hope of Valhall is in reality no more than sublime courage.
Morris himself, in a letter written at the time when he was going
through the Sagas, said 'what a glorious outcome of the worship of
Courage these stories are.' This is, finally, the supreme gift of
the northern race to the world, and it is embodied for us for ever in
the song of _Sigurd the Volsung_; not unquestioning acceptance, not
the cheerful strength of faith, not mere indifference begotten of the
delights of the immediate moment, but a deep sense of the mystery
that may or may not be beneficent in its design, and in the face of
all an invulnerable Courage.