The pronouns I and you, together with several other “shifters,” do not have a referential function in language. Many of the questions we ask (and fail to answer) about lyric poetry arise out of inadmissable translations of I and you into referential forms. Buber’s myth of a primal I-Thou relation gives us a guide to a reading of I and you in Achterberg’s “Ballade” in such a preferential way, I seeking to recover the lost relation by calling You into being through poetic-magical activity. Here the quest of I, however, culminates in confrontation with “the hole,” the void from which comes the Logos. While the nominal theme of the poem is the failure of the poetic-creative self to bring back the Logos, its secret theme is that poesis-as-activity can cause the continual coming-into-being of the Logos and the lost You. (The essay includes a translation of Achterberg’s poem.)