Poetry-lovers have taken to Twitter, Facebook and comment threads, to pay tribute to the poet Seamus Heaney who died this morning.
One Guardian reader posted this message on our news story thread, summing up what many others were saying:
Others including actor and comedy writer Robert Webb, posted on Twitter:
Between my finger and thumb/ the squat pen rests./ I'll dig with it. RIP Seamus Heaney. If you haven't read him since school: 'Human Chain'
— Robert Webb (@arobertwebb) August 30, 2013
Novelist Kamila Shamsie tweeted her memories of seeing Heaney at the the Edinburgh international books festival:
Greatest @edbookfest memory: #SeamusHeaney reciting 'Digging' in response to audience request for a poem. Teary-eyed then; heartbroken now.
— Kamila Shamsie (@kamilashamsie) August 30, 2013
One of our readers, TheFall2007, also posted their memories of the poet:
Feel tremendously saddened by this news. One of the foremost 20th century men of letters has gone. I remember I was lucky enough to attend a reading by Heaney during my time at Aberdeen University, although I was too awestruck to go up to him afterwards. I now wish I had had.
"Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests,
I'll dig with it"
RIP Seamus Heaney
Billy Bragg posted a quote from Heaney's The Cure at Troy:
"Once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme" RIP Seamus Heaney
— Billy Bragg (@billybragg) August 30, 2013
Pianist James Rhodes paid tribute with a verse of his own:
Like the locked toilet cubicle, A sanctuary from the school meanie, So, to my soul, the battered book of poetry By Seamus Heaney #EmoPoetry
— James Rhodes (@JRhodesPianist) August 30, 2013
Stephen Fry tweeted a his tribute in verse, quoting and rewriting a couplet from WH Auden's In Memory of W. B. Yeats:
@stephenfry: Oh how sad, just heard of the death of Seamus Heaney. "Earth receive an honoured guest Seamus Heaney's put to rest."
— Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) August 30, 2013
Others, including this reader, have picked their favourite lines of Heaney's own works to remember him by:
A sad day, not just for his family and friends, or the world of literature but for the world itself. A truly great man.
RIP
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
And poet Michael Rosen, tweeted a simple message:
oh no. Seamus Heaney. Loved your work. Bye.
— Michael Rosen (@MichaelRosenYes) August 30, 2013
This is honestly just the saddest news. He was of my heroes, the first poet I'd ever felt connected to and I'd been hoping to see him for the first time next month at the Magherafelt Poetry Festival. What a huge, huge loss.