Category Archives: poetry

Week 666: Delay, by Elizabeth Jennings

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This is a neat little poem, and the astronomical facts are certainly accurate, but I find it hard to pin down Elizabeth Jennings’s exact thought processes here. Is she thinking of poetic fame, which may take years to arrive, and when it does may indeed find us somewhere else, like, well, dead? The poems of Edward Thomas, for example were barely noticed in his lifetime, and it was not until many years after his death that he became the beloved figure he is now.

Or is there a more specific personal narrative at work here? For example, did the poet once love another who did not reciprocate her feelings until it was too late, when she had moved on and become a different person?

In any event, even if we ourselves may have no such prospect or no such narrative, the poem may still give us incidental cause to reflect on the chance nature of love: on how we come down through life bouncing like a pinball from one accidental circumstance to another. I imagine most of us can frame a thousand scenarios in which we never met our partner: never worked for the same organisation, or attended the same school, or got on the same bus, or went to the same party, all leading to a life unknowably different, in which there perhaps never was another for our eyes, as the poem puts it, to claim as beautiful.

Delay

The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star’s impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

Elizabeth Jennings

Week 665: The Last Hero, by G.K.Chesterton

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This is a rather strange poem, and really it just won’t do. Chesterton’s idea of a hero is apparently a psychopathic loner who carries off women by force and can relate to his fellow men only when he is in the process of bashing their brains out. If this had been penned by some warrior skald in Viking times, some Egill Skallagrímsson say, I suppose it might be accorded the tolerance of autres temps, autres moeurs, but coming from a rather portly Edwardian gentleman who had a romantic infatuation with swords, it seems a little short of ridiculous. And yet, and yet… in its way it is vivid and eloquent, and has lines that, taken out of their martial context, might appeal even to the dedicated pacifist. ‘I shall not die alone, alone, but kin to all the powers,/As merry as the ancient sun and fighting like the flowers.’ Well, that’s certainly the way I want to go, running in my bluebell woods some spring morning when I am a hundred.

The Last Hero

The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day,
There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away,
And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide,
Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and bride.
The heavens are bowed about my head, shouting like seraph wars,
With rains that might put out the sun and clean the sky of stars,
Rains like the fall of ruined seas from secret worlds above,
The roaring of the rains of God none but the lonely love.
Feast in my hall, O foemen, and eat and drink and drain,
You never loved the sun in heaven as I have loved the rain.

The chance of battle changes — so may all battle be;
I stole my lady bride from them, they stole her back from me.
I rent her from her red-roofed hall, I rode and saw arise,
More lovely than the living flowers the hatred in her eyes.
She never loved me, never bent, never was less divine;
The sunset never loved me, the wind was never mine.
Was it all nothing that she stood imperial in duresse?
Silence itself made softer with the sweeping of her dress.
O you who drain the cup of life, O you who wear the crown,
You never loved a woman’s smile as I have loved her frown.

The wind blew out from Bergen to the dawning of the day,
They ride and run with fifty spears to break and bar my way,
I shall not die alone, alone, but kin to all the powers,
As merry as the ancient sun and fighting like the flowers.
How white their steel, how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave,
Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave.
Yea, I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie,
When on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky.
The hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose, —
You never loved your friends, my friends, as I shall love my foes.

Know you what earth shall lose to-night, what rich uncounted loans,
What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones?
My loves in deep dim meadows, my ships that rode at ease,
Ruffling the purple plumage of strange and secret seas.
To see this fair earth as it is to me alone was given,
The blow that breaks my brow to-night shall break the dome of heaven.
The skies I saw, the trees I saw after no eyes shall see,
To-night I die the death of God; the stars shall die with me;
One sound shall sunder all the spears and break the trumpet’s breath:
You never laughed in all your life as I shall laugh in death.

G.K.Chesterton

Week 664: Los heraldos negros, by César Vallejo

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This week another rather bleak piece by the strikingly original Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938; see also week 566). It was written at a time of personal crisis, involving the death of his mother, relationship problems, economic hardship and in the face of all these a struggle to retain the deep Catholic faith of his childhood.

It does seem to be a feature of the devout, that having paid what they feel to be their spiritual dues they react to calamity with a sense of personal outrage rather than a weary acceptance of the fact that bad things happen to good people and that’s just the way the world is. Nevertheless, the poem has struck a chord with many readers for the way it expresses the existential bafflement of man trying to make sense of a senseless universe, and for the way in which Vallejo redeems the passivity of his suffering with the defiance of his art. Yep, when the going gets tough, the tough write a poem…

The translation that follows is my own. The word ‘potro’ in line 7 is a bit of a crux here. It can mean ‘colt’ or ‘foal’ but can also mean ‘rack’ (as used for torture). While the rack is an ancient device, having been used by the Greeks, an association with Attila seems unlikely, but a punishment in Attila’s times was certainly to be trampled to death by horses: see for example the Old Norse poem ‘Hamðismál’, in which two brothers Hamðir and Sörli avenge the death of their sister Svanhild who has been executed in this way by Ermanaric, an emperor of the Goths. Thus I have gone with the equine interpretation as seeming to me the more probable, but I would be interested to know how a native Spanish speaker takes this line.

Los heraldos negros

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes… ¡Yo no sé!
Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos,
la resaca de todo lo sufrido
se empozara en el alma… ¡Yo no sé!

Son pocos; pero son… Abren zanjas oscuras
en el rostro más fiero y en el lomo más fuerte.
Serán tal vez los potros de bárbaros Atilas;
o los heraldos negros que nos manda la Muerte.

Son las caídas hondas de los Cristos del alma
de alguna fe adorable que el Destino blasfema.
Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones
de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema.

Y el hombre… Pobre… ¡pobre! Vuelve los ojos, como
cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada;
vuelve los ojos locos, y todo lo vivido
se empoza, como charco de culpa, en la mirada.

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes… ¡Yo no sé!

César Vallejo

The black heralds

There are blows in life, so heavy… I don’t know!
Blows as from God’s hate, as if beneath them
The undertow of all you ever suffered
Wells up again within you… I don’t know!

They are few, but they are… They scar with their dark trenches
The fiercest faces and the strongest backs.
They are perhaps the steeds of barbarous Attilas
Or the black heralds sent by Death.

They are deep falls that sunder Christ from souls
Whose dear faith is blasphemed by Destiny.
Those bloody blows are like the crackling of bread
Left to burn before the oven door.

And man… Poor man! He turns to look, as when
A touch upon the shoulder summons us;
He looks wild-eyed, and all that he has lived
Pools before his gaze to a puddle of guilt.

There are blows in life, so heavy… I don’t know!


Week 663: Two in August, by John Crowe Ransom/The Thatch, by Robert Frost

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This week’s offer is two poems that are strikingly similar in concept, both using the unrest of birds as a trope for marital disharmony, but widely different in style, Ransom’s ornate patrician gravity contrasting with Frost’s plain-spoken simplicity. I like both poems, though my personal kinship would be more with the Frost. Incidentally I would not think that one poem necessarily influenced the other: it seems a thought that could easily occur independently.

Hackberry: a deciduous tree native to North America, producing small berries in autumn that provide food for birds.

Two in August

Two that could not have lived their single lives
As can some husbands and wives
Did something strange: they tensed their vocal cords
And attacked each other with silences and words
Like catapulted stones and arrowed knives.

Dawn was not yet; night is for loving or sleeping,
Sweet dreams or safekeeping;
Yet he of the wide brows that were used to laurel
And she, the famed for gentleness, must quarrel.
Furious both of them, and scared, and weeping.

How sleepers groan, twitch, wake to such a mood
Is not well understood,
Nor why two entities grown almost one
Should rend and murder trying to get undone,
With individual tigers in their blood.

She in terror fled from the marriage chamber
Circuiting the dark rooms like a string of amber
Round and round and back,
And would not light one lamp against the black,
And heard the clock that clanged: Remember, Remember.

And he must tread barefooted the dim lawn,
Soon he was up and gone;
High in the trees the night-mastered birds were crying
With fear upon their tongues, no singing nor flying
Which are their lovely attitudes by dawn.

Whether those bird-cries were of heaven or hell
There is no way to tell;
In the long ditch of darkness the man walked
Under the hackberry trees where the birds talked
With words too sad and strange to syllable.

John Crowe Ransom

The Thatch

Out alone in the winter rain,
Intent on giving and taking pain.
But never was I far out of sight
Of a certain upper-window light.
The light was what it was all about:
I would not go in till the light went out;
It would not go out till I came in.
Well, we should see which one would win,
We should see which one would be the first to yield.
The world was a black invisible field.
The rain by rights was snow for cold.
The wind was another layer of mold.
But the strangest thing: in the thick old thatch,
Where summer birds had been given hatch,
Had fed in chorus, and lived to fledge,
Some still were living in hermitage.
And as I passed along the eaves
So low I brushed the straw with my sleeves,
I flushed birds out of hole after hole,
Into the darkness. It grieved my soul,
It started a gried within a grief,
To think their case was beyond relief –
They could not go flying about in search
Of their nest again, nor find a perch.
They must brood where they fell in mulch and mire,
Trusting feathers and inwad fire
Till daylight made it safe for a flyer.
My greater grief was by so much reduced
As I thought of them without nest or roost.
That was how that grief started to melt.
They tell me the cottage where we dwelt,
Its wind-torn thatch goes now unmended;
Its life of hundreds of years has ended
By letting the rain I knew outdoors
In onto the upper chamber floors.

Robert Frost

Week 662: Fire and Ice, by Robert Frost

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It is easy to take this little poem of Robert Frost’s, justly celebrated for its laconic deftness, as no more than a pithy generalised reflection on human nature and overlook the fact that it is also saying something deeply personal about Frost’s own nature. ‘From what I’ve tasted of desire’ hints at problems with an ardent temperament more fully explored in his poem ‘The Subverted Flower’, while ‘I think I know enough of hate’ echoes his self-description elsewhere as ‘a good hater’. Under the folksy mask Frost was, perhaps more than most poets, a man of lacerating sensitivity, which is not surprising given that he was over forty before he achieved any recognition as a poet and even then had to endure the ill-informed condescension of critics like Edmund Wilson before his reputation became properly established.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost

Week 661: The Children Look At The Parents, by A.J.S.Tessimond

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As a young man I worked for a while with someone who had, he told me, once shared an office with A.J.S.Tessimond (1902-1962). I expressed suitable awe at the idea of sharing an office with a poet (I did not think it worth mentioning my own endeavours in the field), but had to confess that I was aware only dimly of the name, mainly from a poem about cats featured in some school anthology. I’ve finally after all these years got round to chasing the name up, and found among others this poem about the parent-child relationship, somewhat reminiscent of Larkin’s famous verses on the subject, but less brutal, if still fairly harsh: one senses that a reluctance to wound is at war with the desire to analyse, with the latter winning out.

Of course, the main point of parents has always been to give children someone to blame when their lives turn out not to be perfect, and it is amazing how early this process can start. I remember how when my two eldest sons were four and not quite three I had to break it to them that one of their grandfathers had died. The four year old took it philosophically; the two year old, a child of a very different temper who had not encountered the idea of death before, was absolutely furious with parents so irresponsible as to bring him into a world where this sort of thing could happen, and indeed might one day happen to him. ‘You should have told me not to be born!’ he howled with all the indignation that a two year old can muster, which is quite a lot. I could only apologise.

The Children Look At The Parents

We being so hidden from those who
Have quietly borne and fed us,
How can we answer civilly
Their innocent invitations?

How can we say ‘we see you
As but-for-God’s-grace-ourselves, as
Our caricatures (we yours), with
Time’s telescope between us’?

How can we say ‘you presumed on
The accident of kinship,
Assumed our friendship coatlike,
Not as a badge one fights for’?

How say ‘and you remembered
The sins of our outlived selves and
Your own forgiveness, buried
The hatchet to slow music;

Shared money but not your secrets;
Will leave as your final legacy
A box double-locked by the spider
Packed with your unsolved problems’?

How say all this without capitals,
Italics, anger or pathos,
To those who have seen from the womb come
Enemies? How not say it?

A.J.S.Tessimond

Week 660: Demain, dès l’aube, by Victor Hugo

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This is one of Victor Hugo’s most celebrated poems, written four years after the death of his daughter Leopoldine, aged nineteen, in a boating accident on the Seine. It appears that Hugo made this pilgrimage every Thursday. I find it very moving in its restrained simplicity.

The translation that follows is my own.

Demain, dès l’aube

Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends.
J’irai par la forêt, j’irai par la montagne.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.
 
Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.
 
Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe,
Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,
Et quand j’arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe
Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.

Victor Hugo,  3 septembre 1847

Tomorrow, in the dawn

Tomorrow, in the dawn’s first whitening,
I’ll leave. I know, you see, that you are waiting.
I’ll take the forest path, the upland way.
So far from you I can no longer stay.

I’ll walk, lost in my thoughts, with eyes cast down,
Seeing and hearing nothing, quite alone,
Stooped, anonymous, with hands clasped tight,
Sad, and the day for me will be as night.

I shall not watch the gold as evening falls
Nor, dipping to Harfleur, the far off sails,
And when I arrive, I’ll lay upon your tomb
A garland of green holly and heather in bloom.

Week 659: Prayer, by R.S.Thomas

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So, what’s this about Baudelaire’s grave? The reference is to lines in ‘Les Litanies de Satan’, one of the poems in the nineteenth-century French poet’s collection ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’:

‘Fais que mon âme un jour sous l’Arbre de Science
Près de toi se repose…’

‘Grant that my soul one day, under the Tree of Science,
May rest near to you…’

On the face of it, it may seem odd that the Christian priest R.S.Thomas should invoke lines from a controversial poem in praise of Satan, but I think the point is that Thomas had a lifelong interest in reconciling science and religion, or at least in getting them to coexist, and saw Baudelaire as somewhat of a fellow-spirit in this regard.

‘since I sought and failed/to steal from it’. I find this modesty on the part of the poet a little irritating, and feel like saying ‘Oh, come on, man, you must know you’ve knocked out more good poems than a poet may reasonably expect in one lifetime’. But I guess it goes with Thomas’s somewhat dour outlook, and his discontent with his oeuvre was probably quite genuine.

‘wearing the green leaves of time’. I find the image in the last three lines beautiful, though I would be hard put to tease it out fully. I think the suggestion is one of the spirit of poetry as something platonic that does not in essence change over time and yet in each generation finds a new expression in the current actuality.

Prayer

Baudelaire’s grave
not too far
from the tree of science –
Mine, too,
since I sought and failed
to steal from it,
somewhere within sight
of the tree of poetry
that is eternity wearing
the green leaves of time.

R.S.Thomas

Week 658: The Slow Starter, by Louis MacNeice

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Louis MacNeice remains in my view the one among major mid-twentieth century English poets most accessible to the common reader, especially in the collections of shorter lyrics published towards the end of his life, from one of which this week’s poem is taken. In its low-key way it is a masterclass in what can be done with plain, almost prosaic statement: conversational in tone, and with what might be called poetic special effects being reserved for the brilliantly clinching image in the last two lines.

The Slow Starter

A watched clock never moves, they said:
Leave it alone and you’ll grow up.
Nor will the sulking holiday train
Start sooner if you stamp your feet.
   He left the clock to go its way;
   The whistle blew, the train went gay.

Do not press me so, she said;
Leave me alone and I will write
But not just yet, I am sure you know
The problem. Do not count the days.
   He left the calendar alone;
   The postman knocked, no letter came.

O never force the pace, they said;
Leave it alone, you have lots of time,
Your kind of work is none the worse
For slow maturing. Do not rush.
   He took their tip, he took his time,
   And found his time and talent gone.

Oh you have had your chance, It said;
Left it alone and it was one.
Who said a watched clock never moves?
Look at it now. Your chance was I.
   He turned and saw the accusing clock
   Race like a torrent round a rock.

Louis MacNeice

Week 657: From the ‘Völuspá’

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A good deal of what we know about Norse mythology, and in particular about Ragnarök, the Doom of the Gods, that has so haunted the northern imagination, comes from one tenth-century eddic poem, the Völuspá, or Prophecy of the Sibyl.

The text is difficult, probably corrupt in places, with different readings in different manuscripts. I remember watching in some awe one afternoon as my tutor in Old Norse at Cambridge, the great mediaeval scholar Ursula Dronke, at that time engaged on her masterwork ‘The Poetic Edda’, went through another of the Eddic poems amending and reordering at will; it was at that time I made my one and only contribution to world scholarship by supplying her with a cross-reference to Celtic mythology, which in due course she scrupulously acknowledged in a footnote.

The whole poem is quite long; I have selected just the stanzas from its climax which are probably the best-known and which describe the final battle between the gods on one side and the giants and monsters on the other.

I have long been fascinated by the weird complexity of Norse myth, with its cast of gods and giants, elves and dwarves, giant wolves and serpents, dragons and valkyries, and its cosmogony of nine worlds linked by a mighty ash-tree. And I am intrigued by the question of to what extent and in what way was it believed in. Was the whole scheme, maybe, dreamt up by some pre-mediaeval equivalent of Terry Pratchett after a few hornfuls of mead, and did people then subscribe to it because it made for damn good stories and those stories embodied, in however fanciful a way, profound truths about the human condition? Or were Odin, Thor and the rest as literally real to them as today, for example, to many people Jesus and the Buddha are? Hard to tell now: all we know is that the mythology inspired some fine poetry and offers in the form of the heroic ideal a philosophy of courage and resistance to the end which might not say everything but provides as good a basis as most for an outlook on life.

The translation offered is my own. Eddic poetry is a good deal more straightforward in its diction than skaldic poetry (see week 555) but it can still present difficulties by reason of mythical allusions that have become obscure and uncertainties about the verbal register. The temptation is to adopt a poetic and archaic vocabulary which misrepresents the original. Take the phrase ‘áðr veröld steypisk’. I have seen this translated as ‘ere the world waneth’, but the literal meaning of the verb ‘steypask’ is ‘to stumble or fall headlong’, so it’s more like ‘before the world goes splat’. I have steered a middle course with ‘before the world’s ruin’.

From the Völuspá, stanzas 45 to 57

45. Bræðr munu berjask ok at bönum verðask,
munu systrungar sifjum spilla;
hart er í heimi, hórdómr mikill,
skeggöld, skálmöld, skildir ro klofnir,
vindöld, vargöld, áðr veröld steypisk;
mun engi maðr öðrum þyrma.

45. Brethren will fight, and brother slay brother,
Sisters’ sons break kinship’s bonds;
The world grows hard and whoredom great,
An axe-time, a sword-time, shields are cloven,
A wind-time, a wolf-time, before the world’s ruin,
Nor shall any man spare other men.

45. Lines 4 and 5 look like an interpolation. Sisters’ sons: in all Germanic countries the relations between uncle and nephew were felt to be particularly close.]

46. Leika Míms synir, en mjötuðr kyndisk
at inu galla Gjallarhorni;
hátt blæss Heimdallr, horn er á lofti,
hræðask allir á helvegum.

46. The sons of Mimir sport, but doom
Dwells for them in Heimdall’s horn.
Hard he blows, the horn aloft,
And all upon the hell road quake.

46. The sons of Mimir: the reference is unclear. Heimdall: the watchman of the gods, who guards the Bifrost bridge.

47. Skelfr Yggdrasils askr standandi,
ymr it aldna tré, en jötunn losnar;
mælir Óðinn við Míms höfuð
áðr Surtar þann sefi of gleypir.

47. The ancient ash Yggdrasill trembles,
Its high limbs shake, the giant is loose.
Odin speaks with Mimir’s head,
But the kin of Surt shall slay him soon.

47. Yggdrasill: the world tree. The giant: the wolf Fenrir. The head of Mim: this refers to the story that Mimir was sent by the gods as a hostage to the Vanir after their war, and that the Vanir cut off his head and returned it to the gods. Odin embalmed the head, and gave it the power of speech, so that Mimir’s noted wisdom would always be available to him. The kinsman of Surt: the wolf Fenrir, who slays Odin in the final struggle; cf. stanza 53. Surt: the giant who rules the fire-world, Muspellsheim; cf. stanza 52.

48. Hvat er með ásum? Hvat er með alfum?
Gnýr allr Jötunheimr, æsir ro á þingi,
stynja dvergar fyr steindurum,
veggbergs vísir. Vituð ér enn – eða hvat?

48. How fare the gods? How fare the elves?
Giantland groans, and the gods are met.
The dwarves cry out by doors of stone,
The wreakers of rocks. Would you know yet more?

48. Jotunheim: the land of the giants.

49. Geyr nú Garmr mjök fyr Gnipahelli,
festr mun slitna en freki renna;
fjölð veit ek fræða, fram sé ek lengra
um ragna rök römm sigtíva.

49. The hell-hound howls by Gnipahellir,
The fetters burst and the hound runs free.
Much do I know and more I foresee
Of the great gods’ doom, the mighty in fight.

49. Garmr: the monstrous hound that guards the gates of Hel the land of the dead. Gnipahellir: the cave where Garmr is kept chained until his bonds break at Ragnarok.

50. Hrymr ekr austan, hefisk lind fyrir,
snýsk Jörmungandr í jötunmóði;
ormr knýr unnir, en ari hlakkar,
slítr nái niðfölr, Naglfar losnar.

50. From the east comes Hrym with shield on high,
The serpent writhes in giant wrath,
Weltering waves; the eagle feasts
On dead men’s flesh and the corpse-ship sails.

50. Hrym: the leader of the giants, who comes as the helmsman of the ship Naglfar. The serpent: Miðgarthsorm, one of the children of Loki and the giantess Angrboða. The serpent was cast into the sea, where he completely encircles the land. The eagle: the giant Hræsvelg, who sits at the edge of heaven in the form of an eagle, and makes the winds with his wings. Naglfar: the ship which was made out of dead men’s nails to carry the giants to battle.

51. Kjóll ferr austan, koma munu Múspells
of lög lýðir, en Loki stýrir;
fara fíflmegir með freka allir,
þeim er bróðir Býleists í för.

51. East over sea there comes a ship
With the people of Muspell, and Loki steers.
After the wolf the wild men follow,
And with them Byleist’s brother goes.

51. Muspell: the land of the fire giants. The wolf: Fenrir. The brother of Byleist: Loki. No more is known of Byleist.

52. Surtr ferr sunnan með sviga lævi,
skínn af sverði sól valtíva;
grjótbjörg gnata, en gífr rata,
troða halir helveg, en himinn klofnar.

52. From the south comes Surt with a flail of flame,
The sun of the battle-gods shines in his sword,
The mountains fall, the sky is sundered,
As heroes take the road to hell.

52. Surt: the ruler of the fire-world. ‘sviga laevi’: literaaly, the scourge of branches, i.e. fire. This is an unusual case in the Eddic poems of a ‘kenning’, more characteristic of skaldic verse.

53. Þá kemr Hlínar harmr annarr fram,
er Óðinn ferr við ulf vega,
en bani Belja bjartr at Surti;
þá mun Friggjar falla angan.

53. Now Frigg must suffer a second sorrow:
As Odin fares to fight with the wolf
And Beli’s bright slayer battles with Surt,
For now the joy of Frigg must fall.

53. Hlin: another name for Frigg, Odin’s wife. Her first sorrow was the death of her son Balder, and now she is fated now to see her husband slain by the wolf Fenrir. Beli’s slayer: the god Freyr, who killed the giant Beli with his fist. Freyr, who is fighting without his good sword, is killed by Surt. The joy of Frigg: Odin.

54. Geyr nú Garmr mjök fyr Gnipahelli,
festr mun slitna, en freki renna;
fjölð veit ek fræða, fram sé ek lengra
um ragna rök römm sigtíva.

54. The hell-hound howls by Gnipahellir,
The fetters burst and the wolf runs free.
Much do I know and more I foresee
Of the great gods’ doom, the mighty in fight.

54. A repeat of stanza 49.

55. Þá kemr inn mikli mögr Sigföður,
Víðarr, vega at valdýri.
Lætr hann megi Hveðrungs mundum standa
hjör til hjarta, þá er hefnt föður.

55. Now comes Viðar, the Allfather’s scion,
Mighty in battle, against the beast.
He thrusts his sword into Loki’s son
Full to the heart; his father’s avenged.

55. Sigföður: the Father of Victory i.e. Odin. Viðar is his son, known as the silent god, and famed for his strength. Loki’s son: Fenrir.

56. Þá kemr inn mæri mögr Hlóðynjar, gengr Óðins
sonr við orm vega, drepr af móði Miðgarðs véurr,
munu halir allir heimstöð ryðja; gengr fet níu
Fjörgynjar burr neppr frá naðri níðs ókvíðnum.

56. Then comes great Thor, the son of Odin,
Protector of earth; he slays the snake.
Men flee their homes; he takes nine steps,
Vanquished by venom, he dies undismayed.

56. Hlóðyn: another name for Jorth (‘Earth’), Thor’s mother; his father was Odin. The snake: The Midgard serpent.

57. Sól tér sortna, sígr fold í mar,
hverfa af himni heiðar stjörnur;
geisar eimi ok aldrnari,
leikr hár hiti við himin sjalfan.

57. The sun turns black, earth sinks in sea,
The bright stars vanish from the sky.
A fiery reek devours the all-feeder,
The heat takes hold of heaven itself.

57. The all-feeder i.e. the earth that nourishes all.