sh
Through the dark night showeth the city when the clouds of heaven
clash,
And the gazer shrinketh backward, yet he seeth from end to end
The street and the merry market, and the windows of his friend,
And the pavement where his footsteps yestre'en returning trod,
Now white and changed and dreadful 'neath the threatening voice of God;
So Hogni seeth Gudrun, and the face he used to know,
Unspeakable, unchanging, with white unknitted brow,
With half-closed lips untrembling, with deedless hands and cold
Laid still on knees that stir not, and the linen's moveless fold.

Turned Hogni unto the spear-wall, and smote from where he stood,
And hewed with his sword two-handed as the axe-man in a wood:
Before his sword was a champion and the edges clave to the chin,
And the first man fell in the feast-hall of those that should fall
therein,
Then man with man was dealing, and the Niblung host of war
Was swept by the leaping iron, as the rock anigh the shore
By the ice-cold waves of winter: yet a moment Gunnar stayed,
As high in his hand unbloodied he shook his awful blade;
And he cried:
"O Eastland champions, do ye behold it here,
The sword of the ancient Giuki? Fall on and have no fear,
But slay and be slain and be famous, if your master's will it be!
Yet are we the blameless Niblungs, and bidden guests are we:
So forbear, if ye wander hood-winked, nor for nothing slay and be
slain;
For I know not what to tell you of the dead that live again."

So he saith in the midst of the foemen with his war-flame reared on
high,
But all about and around him goes up a bitter cry
From the iron men of Atli, and the bickering of the steel
Sends a roar up to the roof-ridge, and the Niblung war-ranks reel
Behind the steadfast Gunnar: but lo, have ye seen the corn,
While yet men grind the sickle, by the wind-streak overborne
When the sudden rain sweeps downward, and summer groweth black,
And the smitten wood-side roareth 'neath the driving thunder-wrack?
So before the wise-heart Hogni shrank the champions of the East
As his great voice shook the timbers in the hall of Atli's feast.
There he smote and beheld not the smitten, and by nought were his
edges stopped;
He smote and the dead were thrust from him; a hand with its shield he
lopped;
There met