Spectator competition winners: pen portraits of Seamus Heaney

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