Page:Gummere (1909) The Oldest English Epic.djvu/199

Rh

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.

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!

Hear’st thou, O watchful! Swift whelp of us both borne by Wolf to the wood! Full lightly is parted what never was paired,— the song we two sang!

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