In Competition No. 3318 you were invited to provide a verse portrait of Seamus Heaney by any other poet, living or dead.

This challenge marks the tenth anniversary, last month, of Heaney’s death. Once asked if anything in his work struck him as appropriate as an epitaph, the Nobel Laureate quoted from his translation of Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles. Talking of the old king who dies and vanishes into the earth, the play’s Messenger says: ‘Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.’

Your portraits, in a modest-sized but affecting entry, touched on many themes of Heaney’s work: love, loss, family, nature, memory, politics. Those below take £25.

They cut with shovels, dad and dad.

He digs in with his pen instead.

The calluses those old gents had

Aren’t on his palms, but in his head.

Their damp, dark smells cling to his mind

Instead of on his clothes and skin.

He will not leave the past behind,

The love, the dirt, the grace, the sin.

That hope and history should rhyme

Is what he sets his sights upon,

While knowing that the kings of slime

Will goo his vision with frogspawn.

Once he has scored the Nobel Prize,

There is no reining in his fame.

His fans make waves of rockstar size.

The ‘Heaneyboppers’ is their name.

Chris O’Carroll/Philip Larkin

Much have I travelled in the Muses’ store

And many brilliant verses have I seen;

My heart has ached with elegies that bore

Mournful reviews of friendships that have been.

But when I turned to Seamus Heaney’s lines

Reclaiming relatives from death’s dark cell

I loved the man who, with a bard’s designs,

Conveyed his grieving sentiments so well.

Then felt I like a watcher in each ditch

Where he had found his boyhood happiness

And at the close I knew a brother’s touch

As though I had enjoyed his warm caress.

You were not born for death, dear Seamus, you

Have not yet wished this weary world adieu.

Frank McDonald/Keats

Oh such a lot of effort

When you’re digging up your spuds –

If they are little landmines

Let’s hope that most are duds.

But as you sow your seedlings

You know what you will reap –

A Nobel Prize, for poems

That are ‘ethical and deep’.

Oh you have a sense of humour

And lovely sense of timing

But never ever stopped to think

‘This poem could be rhyming’,

But for peat’s sake I respect you

As you lift your Irish roots

And I could never stand inside

Your large and muddy boots.

Bill Greenwell/Pam Ayres

Oh son of sodden soil and loam,

Ay, soil and loam,

Whose roots in Ireland felt at home,

Deep sunk in soggy ground.

Our paths, I knew, would one day meet

You tramping over bog and peat

In search of faith, once strong and sweet

But now no longer found.

Of present times and times long gone

Ay, times long gone,

You wrote your best and, soldiering on,

By toil gave thoughts new birth

With heart for hoe and pen for spade

You dug for words, the poet’s trade,

Till, crowned in triumph, now you’re laid

To rest in Ireland’s earth.

Alan Millard/Thomas Hardy

How pleasant to know Mr Heaney,

His poems, you’ll find, give a nod

(As his thoughts are decidedly greeny)

To the Emerald Isle, the ‘Ould Sod’.

No runcible hat, though, for Seamus,

Yet his volumes of stuff they are vast,

Translations of Beowulf are famous,

He weeps for the times that are past.

His pa’s a dab hand with a spade

But Seamus, in verses, attests

The pen is the tool of his trade…

Yet now, somewhat squat, the pen rests.

But the bottomless boglands live on

And the fruit that will rot every year,

And the frogs, when the frogspawn has gone,

And we know that old Seamus is there.

Sylvia Fairley/Edward Lear

Poets and Truth make strange bedfellows, but for you

came the luck of spending your pre-pubescent years

among mud-crusted words that discourage lying.

After that came your Quest Perilous. Mad Ireland

went mad again, but when Yeatsian silliness

made violence modish, you stuck to decency.

Nor were you ever ensorcelled by the temptations

of the ochlocratic media; you were not

the sort to confuse a poem with an op-ed.

To me, a New Yorker and connoisseur of the

Platonic Martini, you seem both exemplar

and reproach. When my taste for baroque opera

and sometimes rococo sex lead me to excess,

I can be curbed by visioning your honest

Irish potato-face saying ‘Naughty, naughty.’

Yet you lift spirits, while bringing us down to earth.

George Simmers/very late Auden

No. 3321: Setting off

You are invited to provide a love scene from a novel set in a location that might not be considered conducive to romance. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 11 October.