In Elegy 6, the plenitude of the natural, compared to the sterility of the human, frames an evocative depiction of a fig tree, whose reproductive potency is celebrated in sensuous liquid imagery. It is an erotic transformation of nature, a “sublimation of libidinal energy into a sexual activity” (Midgley, 101), and it finds a mythic climax: the god into the swan. We, however, can experience no such transformation: we are both underripe and overripe at the same time. Only the hero, “indifferent to mere duration” (Leishman and Spender, 128), and those marked for an early departure from the world, “reshaped by death the gardener,” are able to grasp the fullness of life. The son appears and with him a longing for the past. He seeks to return to the mother, now taken into an embrace that was not there in Elegy 3, and to the womb where he had assumed heroic proportions, tearing down pillars to free a path into the external world. Once here, he “storms through the stations of love” to conclude his journey, surrounded by maidens of sacrifice, transformed.