On the death of Seamus Heaney

I received the sad news on the train via sms yesterday. I never knew him personally, unfortunately, but I think I read almost everything he has written and I feel as if a friend had died. Now even a poem on his death has appeared in the blog Eyewear...

I want to remember him in many ways and with many, many of his lines,
 but a line in particular is the first that has embodied for me his tremendous poetical force...from the poem Mint:

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our own disregard.