"unlike many other grievers in the metamorphoses, such as cycnus, pyramus and thisbe, egeria, niobe, and even orpheus - all of whom fail to invent or accept an adequate figure for what they have lost and all of whom are consequently altered or destroyed - apollo and pan are succesful mourners. for unlike the others, they accept their loss and can retain their identities by what we may call a healthy work of mourning, a work that, as freud points out, requires a withdrawal of affection from the lost object and a subsequent reattachment of affection to some substitute for that object. ovid presents a condensed version of this process, a metamorphosis in which the lost object seems to enter or become inscribed in the substitute, in this case the found sign or art. of course only the object as lost, and not he object itself, enters into the substitutive sign, and the latter is accepted only by a turning away from the actual idnetity of what was lost. consolation thus depends on a trope that remains at an essential remove from what it replaces."

from peter sacks, the english elegy