’O blessed Virgin, hear my prayer! 
    Thou star of glory, look on me! 
    Here in the dust I bend before thee,
    Now from this earth oh set me free! 
    Let me, a maiden, pure and white,
    Enter into thy kingdom bright! 
    If vain desires and earthly longing
    Have turn’d my heart from thee away,
    The sinful hopes within me thronging
    Before thy blessed feet I lay. 
    I’ll wrestle with the love I cherish’d,
    Until in death its flame hath perish’d. 
    If of my sin thou wilt not shrive me,
    Yet in this hour, oh grant thy aid! 
    Till thy eternal peace thou give me,
    I vow to live and die thy maid. 
    And on thy bounty I will call,
    That heav’nly grace on him may fall.’

This prayer ended, the broken-hearted Elizabeth slowly totters away, while Wolfram von Eschenbach, who has seen by her pallid face and wasted frame that the death she prays for will not tarry long, sorrowfully realises at last that all his love can save her no pang.

When the evening shadows have fallen, and the stars illumine the sky, he is still lingering by the holy shrine where Elizabeth has breathed her last prayer.  The silence of the night is suddenly broken by the sound of his harp, as he gives vent to his sorrow by an invocation to the stars, among which his lady-love is going to dwell ere-long, and as he sings the last notes a pilgrim slowly draws near.  Wolfram does not at first recognise his old friend and rival Tannhaeuser in this dejected, foot-sore traveller; but when he sees the worn face he anxiously inquires whether he has been absolved, and warns him against venturing within the precincts of the Wartburg unless he has received Papal pardon for his sins.

Tannhaeuser, instead of answering this query, merely asks him to point out the path, which he once found so easily, the path leading to the Venus hill, and only when Wolfram renews his questions does he vouchsafe him a brief account of his journey to Rome.  He tells how he trod the roughest roads barefooted, how he journeyed through heat and cold, eschewing all comforts and alleviation of his hard lot, how he knelt penitently before every shrine, and how fervently he prayed for the forgiveness of the sin which had darkened not only his life but that of his beloved.  Then, in faltering tones, he relates how the Pope shrank from him upon hearing that he had sojourned for a year in the Venus hill, and how sternly he declared there could be no more hope of pardon for such a sin than to see his withered staff blossom and bear leaves:—­

   ’If thou hast shar’d the joys of Hell,
    If thou unholy flames hast nurs’d
    That in the hill of Venus dwell,
    Thou art for evermore accurs’d! 
    And as this barren staff I hold
    Ne’er will put forth a flower or leaf,
    Thus shalt thou never more behold
    Salvation or thy sin’s relief.’