“O Hearken, Kindreds and Nations, and all Kings of the plenteous earth. 
    Heed, ye that shall come hereafter, and are far and far from the birth! 
    I have dwelt in the world aforetime, and I called it the garden of God;
    I have stayed my heart with its sweetness, and fair on its freshness I
      trod;
    I have seen its tempest and wondered, I have cowered adown from its
      rain,
    And desired the brightening sunshine, and seen it and been fain;
    I have waked, time was, in its dawning; its noon and its even I wore;
    I have slept unafraid of its darkness, and the days have been many and
      more: 
    I have dwelt with the deeds of the mighty; I have woven the web of the
      sword;
    I have borne up the guilt nor repented; I have sorrowed nor spoken the
      word;
    And I fought and was glad in the morning, and I sing in the night and
      the end: 
    So let him stand forth, the Accuser, and do on the death-shoon to wend;
    For not here on the earth shall I hearken, nor on earth for the
      dooming shall stay,
    Nor stretch out mine hand for the pleading; for I see the spring of
      the day
    Round the doors of the golden Valhall, and I see the mighty arise,
    And I hearken the voice of Odin, and his mouth on Gunnar cries,
    And he nameth the Son of Giuki, and cries on deeds long done,
    And the fathers of my fathers, and the sons of yore agone.

    “O Odin, I see, and I hearken; but, lo thou, the bonds on my feet,
    And the walls of the wilderness round me, ere the light of thy land I
      meet! 
    I crave and I weary, Allfather, and long and dark is the road;
    And the feet of the mighty are weakened, and the back is bent with the
      load.”

    Then fainted the song of Gunnar, and the harp from his hand fell down,
    And he cried:  “Ah, what hath betided? for cold the world hath grown,
    And cold is the heart within me, and my hand is heavy and strange;
    What voice is the voice I hearken in the chill and the dusk and the
      change? 
    Where art thou, God of the war-fain? for this is the death indeed;
    And I unsworded, unshielded, in the Day of the Niblungs’ Need!”

    He fell to the earth as he spake, and life left Gunnar the King,
    For his heart was chilled for ever by the sleepless serpent’s sting,
    The grey Worm, Great and Ancient—­and day in the East began,
    And the moon was low in the heavens, and the light clouds over him ran.

    The Ending of Gudrun.

    Men sleep in the dwelling of Atli through the latter hours of night,
    Though the comfortless women be wailing as they that love not light
    Men sleep in the dawning-hour, and bowed down is Atli’s head
    Amidst the gold and the purple, and the pillows of his bed: