The tenth Elegy opens with one final expressive outpouring from the lyrical subject, an outpouring that returns us to the pained subjectivity of Elegy 1. What follows has been described as a “topographical allegory” (Crucefix, 101), where the lyrical “I” of the first Elegy is sublimated into a non-lyrical “I” of this Elegy, in a narrative of increasing ethereality. The poem moves from the topos of the city to the ultimate topos, “the broad landscape / of the Laments.” The former is a place of easy amusement and false idols; the latter offers the quiet transfiguration of the spirit, as it extols the superiority of pain over false consolations, material and religious. A young man appears and falls in love with an enigmatic female simply called “Lament” (“Klage”). In a poem that possesses a rare narrative in the Elegies, physical love, which does not take place, is replaced by a spiritual love, which does, as young Lament gives way to an older Lament. She leads the youth, now refashioned as the young-dead, through a terrain attenuated and sepulchral, and where the distinctions between knowledge and death, the living and the dead, no longer exist.