A life scarce worth the living, a poor fame Scarce worth the winning, in a wretched land, Where fear and pain go upon either hand, As toward the end men fare without an aim Unto the dull grey dark from whence they came: Let them alone, the unshadowed sheer rocks stand Over the twilight graves of that poor band, Who count so little in the great world's game!
Nay, with the dead I deal not; this man lives, And that which carried him through good and ill, Stern against fate while his voice echoed still From rock to rock, now he lies silent, strives With wasting time, and through its long lapse gives Another friend to me, life's void to fill.
In the three volumes of _The Earthly Paradise_, published by William Morris in 1868-1870, there are three poems which hail from Old Norse originals. They are "The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon," and "The Lovers of Gudrun," in Vol. II, and "The Fostering of Aslaug," in Vol. III. Of these "The Lovers of Gudrun" forms a class by itself; it is a poem to be reckoned with when the dozen greatest poems of the century are listed. The late Laureate may have equalled it in the best of the _Idylls of the King_, but he never excelled it. Let us look at it in detail.
First, be it said that "The Lovers of Gudrun" overtops all the other poems in _The Earthly Paradise_. It would be possible to prove that Morris was at his best when he worked with Old Norse material, but that task shall not detain us now. It is enough to note that the "Prologue" to _The Earthly Paradise_, called "The Wanderers," makes the leader of these wanderers, who turn story-tellers when they reach the city by "the borders of the Grecian sea," a Norseman. Born in Byzantium of a Greek mother, he claimed Norway as his home, and on his father's death returned to his kin. His speech to the Elder of the City reveals a touching loyalty to his father's home and traditions:
But when I reached one dying autumn-tide My uncle's dwelling near the forest-side, And saw the land so scanty and so bare, And all the hard things men contend with there, A little and unworthy land it seemed, And yet the more of Asagard I dreamed, And worthier seemed the ancient faith of praise.
Here is the man, William Morris, in perfect miniature. Modern life and training had given him a speech and aspect quite suave and cultured, but the blood that flowed in his veins was red, and the tincture of iron was in it. In religion, in art, in poetry, in economics, he loved the past better than the present, though he was never unconscious of "our glorious gains." In all departments of thought the scanty, the bare, the hard, the unworthy, drew first his attention and then his love and enthusiastic praise. And so perhaps it is explained that of all the poems in _The Earthly Paradise_, the one indited first in the scarred and dreadful land where neither wheat nor wine is at home, shall be the finest in this latter-day retelling.