Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

Heaney frames poetry as an experience that resists full mastery: it retains a residue of mystery even for those who read and write it closely. The “relationship” he mentions suggests that a poem is not merely an object to decode but something that addresses the reader, implicating memory, feeling, and identity. The line also hints at poetry’s double nature in Heaney’s thinking—at once intimate (it can feel personally addressed) and estranging (it can’t be reduced to paraphrase). In that tension, poetry becomes a space where readers continually renegotiate what they know, what they feel, and what language can and cannot make explicit.