Summary: We present a well-posed and discretely stable perfectly matched layer for the anisotropic (and isotropic) elastic wave equations without first re-writing the governing equations as a first order system. The new model is derived by the complex coordinate stretching technique. Using standard perturbation methods we show that complex frequency shift together with a chosen real scaling factor ensures the decay of eigen-modes for all relevant frequencies. To buttress the stability properties and the robustness of the proposed model, numerical experiments are presented for anisotropic elastic wave equations. The model is approximated with a stable node-centered finite difference scheme that is second order accurate both in time and space.