that haunts all artists, even friendly ones—and I don’t think that Joyce was
always so friendly. So even if comically, Eugenides’s little imagined reverie
here points to one of the most central activities of poetry, namely that it makes
the absent thing present again. To put it more succinctly, by applying all the
imaginative and rhetorical powers at its disposal, poetry makes it seemas if the
lost or missing thing is visible and restored again. In nearly every case, language
cannot achieve what it promises, and the world-making claims of poetic
fictiveness are therefinally pierced and shown to be a fancy,‘as capable of
success as trying to catch wind in a net’, as Thomas Wyatt proverbially puts it.^40
The scholar Thomas Green has pondered how this pervasive difficulty of
putting things into words led to the magical impulse to call things into being.
Green argues that the direct address of poetry represents that art’s own
artificial response to this desire.^41 The later Heidegger understood that this
poetic naming‘calls into the word’, and this calling‘brings the presence of
what was previously uncalled into a nearness’.^42 That tenacious absence,
though, is crucial. If poetic language could call things into being, it would be
mere magic, a sure thing, as Green argues. Yet poets know there is no‘sure
thing’, wherefore they appeal to higher powers, to any help to achieve this
poetic naming. For example, to concentrate or catalyse his lyrical powers,
Wyatt writes, ‘My lute, awake!’Percy Shelley’s‘Ode to the West Wind’
sublimates his wish towards sheer identification of artist and art:‘O wild
West Wind’(1.1), Shelley writes,‘hear, oh, hear!’(1.14) and, what’s more,
he writes,‘Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is...Be thou, Spiritfierce, / My
spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!’(5.1–6).^43 If Shelley sublimates Wyatt’s
and others’direct addresses, I prefer in turn to sacralize Shelley—I’m sure he
wouldn’t like that—by setting a passage from the Swiss theologian Hans Urs
von Balthasar beside his poem. Shelley’s artistic wish to blend with nature’s
wind-driven instrumentation now becomes an image of the Christian believer
wishful for divine reception, obedient in the face of God’s prompting:‘When
our chords are taut, God plays on our soul by himself.’^44 We should be, in
other words, a human instrument ready for playing—poetically or otherwise—
in writing poems, in being the poem, God’s workmanship,poiema, as the
(^40) The original line reads‘since in a nett I seke to hold the wynde’(1.8). For the original
source see‘Who so list to hount’,The Poems of Sir Thomas Wiat, edited from the MSS and early
editions by A. K. Foxwell (London: University of London Press, 1913), 15.
(^41) No reference found.
(^42) Martin Heidegger,‘Language’,inPoetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New
York: HarperCollins, 2001), 196.
(^43) Percy Shelley,‘Ode to the West Wind’,inOde to the West Wind and Other Poems(New
York: Dover Publications, 1993), 35–7.
(^44) Quoted in Margaret Hebblethwaite,‘Balthasar’s Golden Touch’,The Tablet, 20 September
1997, http://archive.thetablet.co.uk/article/20th-september-1997/32/balthasars-golden-touch,
accessed 10 February 2016. (Original reference not found.)
186 Brett Foster