The absolute requirements of absolute love and the inconstant affections of relative “love,” the attainment of beauty that should belong to us (but does not), and the instability of the human in contrast to the stability of the object world are some of the themes of the second Elegy, and they are explored within the context of speculations about what a real self might be in terms of “being” (“Sein”). The elegiac voice of Elegy 1 now gives way to a methodical discursivity, which forms the medium for a speaking subject impatient to get to the truth, so that it might interrogate the complex evasions of selfhood, linguistic and attitudinal, that adhere not only to lovers but to all who are condemned to stand on the wrong side of the Angelic.

The Elegy opens with yet a further call to the Angels, whose dark presence, here, as elsewhere in the Elegies, is seen both as threat and promise, their existence pointing to a higher realm, a realm from which we know that we must remain excluded. It begins not in the conditional mood of the first Elegy but with the simple present tense, stating what is. It seems that we have learnt a lesson: