Some of those who have grappled with the incoherent despair ostensibly portrayed in 2.8 ended up by contracting the very distemper they were anxious to explain. O. L. Richmond, Butler and Barber, Damon and Helmbold, all carved up, with varying degrees of inhibition, the forty lines that our MSS invariably transmit as a unity. Those who came to the poem's rescue (chiefly Rothstein, Abel, La Penna, Enk) have had the better cause, and more recent editions confirm that no recidivist activity has since taken place. One suspects that this consensus has been reached not so much on the basis of Enk's vague ‘si carmen psychologice interpretamur’ as because of the kind of arguments that T. A. Suits has advanced – namely, that the elegy exhibits a recognisable, well-balanced formal structure. That this structure has been employed to accommodate what on the evidence of most interpreters must be a wellnigh unbalanced lover should be seen as one of the strengths of the poem. To a certain extent our response to 2.8 must be conditioned by an awareness of the tension between formal neatness and turbid emotional content; in fact, this much can be extrapolated from such analyses as, for instance, Suits, in the above-mentioned article, and D. P. Harmon offer. Yet this is only part of the story.