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Haim Gouri, the sublime and prolific Israeli poet, had his own distinct way of answering the question, “How are you?”

“He would answer in two ways,” his daughter Hamutal recalled on Wednesday morning. One was to simply say, “I am as my nation is.” The other was more grim. “The land of Israel hurts me.”

“He was connected to this land with every aspect of his soul,” Hamutal said.

That statement wouldn’t surprise many Israelis who knew Gouri or admired his writing. Gouri, who died on Wednesday, and whose poetry was included in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, is being honored as a national treasure—“the national poet of our times,” as Israel’s president, Reuben Rivlin, said.

It’s easy to see why, for many Israelis, Gouri is virtually synonymous with Israel itself. Gouri embodied an Israeli ideal. Not the prickly sabra, or the studious Yeshiva bocher, but a sensitive, humane, fully integrated type of masculinity: fierce yet refined; strong yet highly cultivated; adept with pen and sword, both.

That wasn't the only reason. To a remarkable degree, Gouri both experienced and chronicled his country’s history. In the 1940s, he served in the Palmach, the elite unit of the Haganah, helping Hungarian Jewish Displaced Persons emigrate to Palestine. During the busy, bloody years that followed, he carried out military operations against British Mandate forces and fought in the War of independence. Called back, decades later, to service, he fought in both the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War.

Gouri memorialized his fallen comrades in beautiful, haunting, and haunted verse. (His early collection, Here Lie our Bodies, includes a tribute to 35 Haganah soldiers who died in a failed mission.) In 1961, Gouri covered the Eichmann trial as a journalist, producing a book, Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Gouri was outspoken—more so, perhaps, as he aged. Religion had become “an established and coercive force” in Israeli politics, he warned in 2007, calling for greater separation of religion and state. “This is serious damage,” he went on:

       In my opinion, it is necessary to establish an overarching Israeli identity that

       will suit both a child from Colombia who was born and has grown up here

       and speaks Hebrew and is connected to us, and a Jew from Russia about

       whose Jewishness there are doubts. A people that was persecuted because

       of its identity and language should not be taking a crushing approach toward

       others in its country.

Gouri’s 2009 poetry collection, Eyval, provided the bookend to a body of work that began in the 1940s. “Gouri’s life story is interwoven with the history of the state of Israel,” said Knesset member Yuli Edelstein, “and his poems have been and will always remain a part of the Israeli ethos.”

Gouri’s grim, bracing poem “The One Following Us” was selected for Volume 10 of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. The opening line—“I'm no longer the man that once was”—establishes the rueful, sad tone of the piece, which includes the line, “Day by day I drown inside my flooded soul.” This is a heavy poem that doesn’t conceal its scars.

Is there hope—a life raft, as it were—for the narrator? It’s hard to say. The poem floats in ambiguity.

It evokes an old man recalling his youth and pondering the terrible losses that age brings. At several points, he seems desperate: “Just don't let it get any worse than this,” he pleads. Is he peeking into the abyss, thinking of suicide? Apparently not. The poem ends on a razor’s edge, perfectly pitched between hope and despair.

Was Gouri writing about himself? We cannot know for sure, yet we can’t help but wonder.

That ambiguity—artful, slightly maddening—is part of the poem’s artistry, its honesty, and its power.