The will to transcendence takes forms authentic and inauthentic. In the fifth Elegy, we meet the traveling circus artistes. They are symbols of a vacuous and pointless artistry, whose aerial routines that elsewhere in the Elegies might have been treated as signifiers of the transcendent and part of their sublimatio symbolism (Polikoff, 538), are seen here as contrived and lacking conviction. Their performances are attended by spectators likewise devoid of commitment, and whose viewing (a key term in Rilke's conceptual framework) is a mere looking, rather than a creative grasping of the world through the eye. This is an art without spirit (hence the emphasis on the body throughout) in which, as the final figure in this Elegy, Madame Lamort testifies, by her very name, the ultimate and inescapable quietus dwells.

But perhaps all is not loss, for at one crucial moment in the Elegy the lyrical subject gives voice to a longing for a place that is “unknown to us,” where consummation, even, as we learn from the final stanza, the impossible consummation of love might be possible. Here, we might be freed from our lamentable state of being, hopelessly positioned as we are between the “pure too little” and the “empty too much.”