Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

Heaney’s sentence imagines poetry as an “order” or shaping principle that can make lived experience intelligible over time. The paradox—“grow up to that which we stored up as we grew”—suggests that childhood and early life accumulate impressions, language, and feeling before we have the maturity to understand them. Later, through art, we can finally “grow up to” those stored materials: memory becomes meaning, and private experience finds a form that can be shared. The phrase also hints at an ethical or developmental arc: poetry is not mere ornament but a disciplined arrangement that helps the self become equal to its own past, turning recollection into a coherent, responsible adulthood of perception.