III
On my Wolf I waited with wide-faring hopes.
When rainy the weather and rueful I sat there,
then the battle-brave man embraced me beside him.
Delight had I of it; no less had I sorrow.[1]
IV
Wolf, O my Wolf, my waiting and hope of thee,
’twas they made me sick, and thy seldom-coming,
my heavy-weighed heart, and not hunger for food!
V
Hear’st thou, O watchful![2] Swift whelp of us both[3]
borne by Wolf to the wood!
Full lightly is parted what never was paired,—
the song we two sang![4]
Now as compared with Deor, translated below, this Lament shows signs of the Norse stanzaic structure which are not found in the companion piece. Deor’s so-called stanzas are due simply to a recurring and consistently applicable refrain line, such as, for modern instance, one finds in Tennyson’s Tears, Idle Tears. Parallelism, obvious in Deor at the start and so characteristic of all Anglo-Saxon verse, is not found in the Lament. Deor is
- ↑ Concentration of the tragic moment. Signy loathed her unnatural mission; she joyed in the anticipated vengeance thus made possible.
- ↑ By Schofield’s interpretation. She now addresses her husband, “the vigilant”; perhaps here in mocking use of the epithet?
- ↑ Herself and Sigmund. She has given the boy to her brother.—Or is “of us both” a reference, like “vigilant,” to Siggelr’s belief that he is father to Sinflotli?
- ↑ Emended to “the way we two walked.” The short even verses and long odd verses, as in Norse, make a plain stanza here, just as in certain gnomic verses one gets a stanza by arrangement. In the first and second stanzas, as assumed, of this poem, a refrain, and also repetition of a line, mark off the bounds.
