I learned that Seamus Heaney had died from a New York Times push notification, a feature on my phone that I keep intending to turn off. It was the saddest I have been about a poet’s death since the death of James Merrill, in 1995, which I learned about, also upon waking, from the NPR broadcast that served as an alarm on my clock radio. Poets place their voices inside our heads, so close to our thoughts that it feels as though we’ve thought them up. It is odd when they make the news, which they do only occasionally, and only by making it very big, by winning the Nobel Prize, as Heaney did, and by dying. It is like learning from the media something secret about yourself, something you thought you’d kept well hidden.

Heaney’s poems were full of finds, unlikely retrievals from the slime of the ground or the murk of history and memory. His poems about peat bogs and what they preserve are probably the most important English-language poems written in the past fifty years about violence—the “intimate, tribal revenge” that underscores the news. But they never stray an inch from the personal tone that Heaney honed in his poems about his four-year-old brother’s death or his mother’s method of slicing potatoes into soup. That the same vocabulary, the same notes, and the same intelligence could govern his personal poems and his political ones only pointed to the arbitrariness of the distinction.

Just as a peat bog might contain an elk skeleton, a stick of butter, or the entire, snug corpse of a murder victim, the “word hoard” of English held, for Heaney, infinite discoveries. When he was commissioned to translate “Beowulf,” he said he found the task onerous until he had a breakthrough: he discovered in the Anglo-Saxon text a word he remembered his grandmother using that he hadn’t heard since—“thole,” which means “suffer.” Everything about this epiphany is classic Heaney: finding the seed of English poetry, “Beowulf,” on the tip of his grandmother’s tongue; finding a word so downcast in a memory so warm, the mingled pain and sweetness, history and the hearth.

We all carry around our favorite Heaney. Mine is “Squarings,” his brilliant sequence of not-quite-sonnets, named after a term from marbles. In these poems, the rectangular shape of the sonnet is “squared” by lopping off the couplet. The resulting twelve lines, four neat tercets, draw upon the oblique angles of childhood, the only time in our life when we know what being very small is like, and the time when we are most likely to be flush with the earth, on our knees or bellies or sides in the dirt:

I was four but I turned four hundred maybe

Encountering the ancient dampish feel

Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.

Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats

In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould

Around the terra cotta water-crock

Ground of being. Body’s deep obedience

To all its shifting tenses. A half-door

Opening directly into starlight.

Out of that earth house I inherited

A stack of singular, cold memory-weights

To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.

The work of these poems is to make as real as possible the represented sensory experiences of the child, conveying their aromas and textures as though at first hand. Perhaps no poet has ever been better at this one thing. For Heaney, being a writer means going wherever it takes to find “the scale of things,” even doing what he describes the young Thomas Hardy doing in a later poem in the sequence:

Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,

Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead

And lay down flat among their dainty shins. In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy space

He experimented with infinity.

His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch

Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused

In the fleece-hustle was the original Of a ripple that would travel eighty years

Outward from there, to be the same ripple

Inside him at its last circumference.

The minute and crabbed always opens out into “infinity,” whose dimensions are only glimpsed from the confines of a room, the arbitrary boundaries of a game of marbles or a short poem in regular stanzas.

Heaney’s poems made you feel confided in, addressed at close range; he was like that in person, too. A couple of memories: Twenty-two years ago, my roommates and I crawled out of the muck and slime of our dorm rooms to hear Heaney read to a packed house in Johnson Chapel, at Amherst College. When I picture that room, I always think of Robert Frost’s description of a cup filled “to the brim / And even above the brim.” Students were splayed everywhere, in the aisles and on the backs of pews. Later, at a party at a professor’s house, we ate myriad shrimps and tried to look at home drinking wine. Heaney spent an inordinate amount of time laughing and joking with us, until his attention turned sharply to the door: Joseph Brodsky had arrived, so disheveled his clothes appeared to be on sideways. A few years later, at a department Christmas party at Harvard, Heaney infiltrated the large bloc of graduate students looking postmodern by the Xeroxes and made mischievous jokes about colleagues. When his wine glass was empty, as it always seemed to be, he told us, “Wait right here; don’t go anywhere.” He made a beeline to where the wine bottles were, filled his cup, and came right back, just the way he’d promised.

Above: Seamus Heaney in 1993. Photograph by Richard Franck Smith/Sygma/Corbis.