The plan of the poem seems to me, then, to be perfectly wrought, and the treatment of one part of it not so instinctively right as that of the rest, which is beyond all criticism. As to the actual workmanship apart from the design, the general examination of Morris's methods which has already been made in an earlier chapter covers its main characteristics. But there are qualities here which were not found in Jason or The Earthly Paradise. There was in those poems an extraordinary ease and at the same time an indication of a titanic strength in reserve. In Sigurd this reserve is used, but all the ease is, by some superb paradox of artistic power, retained. The hewn rocks and the cloud-wrack of Iceland, the great thews of Sigurd and the might of his god-given sword, the proud beauty of the deep-bosomed women who are the mates and mothers of fierce and terrible kings, all these things are sung with a vigour as tremendous as is their own, and yet there is not a strained moment or an uncontrolled turn of expression from beginning to end. And, save in places where the substance of the story itself momentarily excludes it, there is always beauty in the strength. Again we have but to read a page or two into the poem to find an example. Sensuous beauty and fiery strength could not well be more perfectly blended than in this description of the Volsung throne under the Branstock:—
So there was the throne of Volsung beneath its blossoming
bower,
But high o'er the roof-crest red it rose 'twixt tower and
tower;
And therein were the wild hawks dwelling, abiding the dole
of their lord,
And they wailed high over the wine, and laughed to the
waking sword.
And again, when Sigurd is singing in the Niblung hall:—
But his song and his fond desire go up to the cloudy roof,
And blend with the eagles' shrilling in the windy night aloof.
It is at the end of the book of Regin that Sigurd finds Brynhild asleep
on the tower-top of the world,
High over the cloud-wrought castle whence the windy bolts
are hurled;
and from the moment he awakens her new light and life break into the narrative. Not only in their troth-plighting is a new note of human passion struck, but the Volsung spirit in Sigurd undergoes a change and takes on a larger charity and a more beneficent purpose.
So the day grew old about them and the joy of their desire,
And eve and the sunset came, and faint grew the sunset fire,
And the shadowless death of the day, was sweet in the
golden tide;
But the stars shone forth on the world and the twilight
changed and died;
And sure if the first of man-folk had been born to that
starry night,
And had heard no tale of the sunrise, he had never longed
for the light:
But Earth longed amidst her slumber, as 'neath the night
she lay,
And fresh and all abundant abode the deeds of Day.
And these abundant deeds of day are deeds of peace and healing. Sigurd among Hemir and his 'Lymdale forest lords' brings the dawn of a new age, when
The axe-age and the sword-age seem dead a while ago,
And the age of the cleaving of shields, of brother by
brother slain,
And the bitter days of the whoredom, and the hardened lust
of gain;
But man to man may hearken, and he that soweth reaps,
And hushed is the heart of Feurir in the wolf-den of the
deeps...