(P. 311.)

And Kiartan does his work in the world.  Poor Refna, when she has married Kiartan hears women talking of the love that still is between Gudrun and Kiartan.  She goes to Kiartan with the story, beginning with words whose pathos must conquer the most stoical of readers: 

          Indeed of all thy grief I knew,
    But deemed if still thou saw’st me kind and true,
    Not asking too much, yet not failing aught
    To show that not far off need love be sought,
    If thou shouldst need love—­if thou sawest all this,
    Thou wouldst not grudge to show me what a bliss
    Thy whole love was, by giving unto me
    As unto one who loved thee silently,
    Now and again the broken crumbs thereof: 
    Alas!  I, having then no part in love,
    Knew not how naught, naught can allay the soul
    Of that sad thirst, but love untouched and whole! 
    Kinder than e’er I durst have hoped thou art,
    Forgive me then, that yet my craving heart
    Is so unsatisfied; I know that thou
    Art fain to dream that I am happy now,
    And for that seeming ever do I strive;
    Thy half-love, dearest, keeps me still alive
    To love thee; and I bless it—­but at whiles,—­

(P. 343)

And thus she gains strength to live her life.

Here, then, in Bodli, is another of the great tragic figures in literature—­a sick man.  There are many of them, even in the highest rank of literary creations, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth!  Wrong-headed, defective as they are, we would not have them otherwise.  The pearl of greatest price is the result of an abnormal or morbid process.

Bodli comes to us from Icelandic literature, and in that fact we note the solidarity of poetic geniuses.  Not only is the great figure of Bodli proof of this solidarity, but many other features of this poem prove it.  “Lively feeling for a situation and power to express it constitute the poet,” said Goethe.  There are dramatic situations in “The Lovers of Gudrun” which hold the reader in a breathless state till the last word is said, and then leave him marveling at the imagination that could conceive the scene, and the power that could express it.  There are gentler scenes, too, in the poem, where beauty and grace are conceived as fair as ever poet dreamed, and the workmanship is thoroughly adequate.  As an example of the first, take the scene of Bodli’s mourning over Kiartan’s dead body.  It is here that we get that knowledge of Bodli’s woe that robs us of a cause against him.  What agony is that which can speak thus over the body of the dead rival!

                         ...  Didst thou quite
    Know all the value of that dear delight
    As I did?  Kiartan, she is changed to thee;
    Yea, and since hope is dead changed too to me,
    What shall we do, if, each of each forgiven,
    We three shall meet at last in that fair heaven