Summary

The speaker reflects on Elizabeth's beauty and grieves that it has left the world. Her physical perfection, he argues, would have been an exemplar for moral perfection. It would have created a sense of harmony for others to aspire to. Now her physical beauty, like her ethical virtues, have disappeared.

The speaker concludes that the world is an "ugly" "monster" (326). Its faults are both inward and outward. Like a precious stone that has been scratched over time, it has lost all its beauty. With Elizabeth, it could perhaps have recovered, but now she is dead. Death follows on life so quickly that life is ultimately not worth living. There is no way of knowing if there is any redemption in heaven, which makes this suffering dramatically worse.

Elizabeth could not have fixed this, but she could have given some virtues back to some things...