In the poem ‘Digging’ Seamus Heaney observes his father at work ‘stooping in rhythm through potato drills’. This is the opening poem in his first book Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966. He admires his father’s skill and also recounts how his grandfather could ‘cut more turf in a day/Than any other man on Toner’s bog’.

He knew that he too would be measured by farming skills and, as the eldest of nine children, he would be expected to carry on the farming tradition. The poem is not a betrayal of this life, but a manifesto that he will be a follower of the tradition with pen rather than spade, as outlined in the closing lines:

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

His decision to take a different course than his forebears could be likened to Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. However, the early experiences of farm life and landscape and the sense of place these evoke, remained at the core of his work throughout his enormously productive life. As he told Dennis O’Driscoll in a series of interviews in Stepping Stones, ‘the early-in-life experience has been central to me…but I’d say you aren’t so much trying to describe it as trying to locate it’.

He admired poets such as Robert Frost, Les Murray, Patrick Kavanagh and Peter Fallon, who all not only wrote about farming but even managed to combine farming and poetry, at least for a time.

His admiration for poets of the land goes all the way back to the first century BC; to Virgil and his epic poem Georgics whose subject is farming — practical and poetic. In his review of Peter Fallon’s translation of Georgics, he wrote: ‘All you have to do is read the opening lines in order to feel yourself – and the earthy – coming alive all over again’.

He valued Virgil’s poem ‘as a reminder of the centrality of agriculture to the survival of the population’. When he said that Virgil’s poem is about “love of the land, the physical ground which is the people’s home ground,” he could be describing his own unique and visionary approach to poetry and to life.

Re-reading his poems and listening to his voice again since he passed away last Friday, it is easy to see what former US president Bill Clinton, meant when he said: “His mind, heart and his uniquely Irish gift for language made him our finest poet of the rhythms of ordinary lives.” Any number of poems about farm life would illustrate this description, including ‘The Baler’:

All day the clunk of a baler

Ongoing cardiac dull,

So taken for granted

It was evening before I came to

To what I was hearing

And missing: summer’s richest hours

As they had been to begin with,

Fork-lifted, sweated through

And nearly rewarded enough

By the giddied-up race of a tractor

At the end of the day

Last-lapping a hayfield.

His relationship with the land and place is based on real experience and what he called ‘down-to-earthness’. As a result, it is lyrical but unsentimental and rings true as a bell whether he is writing about hay saving, turf-cutting or potato harvesting.

In ‘At a Potato Digging’, there isn’t much time for sentiment as ‘A mechanical digger wrecks the drill, Spins up a dark shower of roots and mould.’

Although the machine has replaced manual digging, the poem is a celebration of a healthy harvest but also a reminder of darker times when the potato ‘soured the land in ‘forty five’/wolfed and blighted root and died’. This ability to switch from day-to-day living to darker more complex subjects, such as sectarianism, also marks him apart as a poet of conscience and deep humanity.

His relationship with trees and woodlands is also unique for an Irish poet. They appear frequently in his poems reaching a crescendo in Sweeney Astray, his translation of the epic poem Buile Suibhne (The Madness of Sweeney).

He began this work in 1972 after he and his family moved from Belfast to Ashford, Co Wicklow, close to the Devil’s Glen woodland. At the centre of the poem is a hymn-like roll-call of 16 trees and other flora beginning with:

The bushy leafy oak tree

is highest in the wood,

the forking shoots of hazel

hide sweet hazel-nuts.

The alder is my darling,

all thornless in the gap,

some milk of human kindness

coursing in its sap.

The poem describes the travails of the mythological Sweeney who has been banished from society. The translation is a huge success because Heaney understood Sweeney the underdog and his interaction with the trees and woodlands.

No doubt living in the wooded area of the Devil’s Glen sharpened this observation and how an outcast, such as Sweeney, would find comfort in the woods (‘Glen Bolcain, my pillow and heart’s ease/my Eden thick with apple trees.’) but also pain (‘Tonight, in torment, in Glasgally/I am crucified in the fork of a tree.’)

In other works, trees appear as individuals in ‘The Poplar’ (‘Wind shakes the big poplar, quicksilvering/The whole tree in a single sweep,’) or in the safety of numbers in ‘The Plantation’:

Any point in that wood

Was a centre, birch trunks

Ghosting your bearings,

Improvising charmed rings…

His interest in trees and woods led me to approach him in 1998 to launch the Michael Warren sculpture Antaeus in the Devil’s Glen project Sculpture in Woodland.

I was conscious of the huge demands placed on him as a public figure since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature three years previously. But, he not only graciously agreed but also wrote an inspiring essay on the importance of woodlands and trees in our lives, as well as their place in mythology and art.

He talked about trees, their value to the planet and the need for their protection and conservation. He said: “The universe we live in is both active and interactive, and as our awareness of the interdependence of all life increases, so does our awareness that a threat to any bit of it, however small, constitutes a threat to the whole thing. No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit.’’

Reading it again, it is a reminder of the beauty and importance of trees and woodlands and our unique relationship with them as well as a poignant reminder of our mortality: ‘Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities yet strong at the central trunk, susceptible like ourselves to the weather, companionable, a shelter, a thing you can put your back to or lay your body down in at the end.’

He is survived by his wife Marie (née Devlin), sons Michael and Christopher and daughter Catherine Ann.