Seamus Heaney's poems were last night toasted as "reports from the heart" at a "literary wake" for the late poet and Nobel laureate in London.
The event brought together poets, writers, actors and musicians, including The Chieftains.
Heaney died in Dublin on 30 August at the age of 74.
Poets Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley and Bernard O'Donoghue read some of Heaney's most famous works at the event.
Among them were the early poem Mid-Term Break, in which Heaney described coming home from school at the age of 14 for the funeral of his younger brother, who had been hit by a car.
The Chieftains, joined by harpist Dianne Marshall and sean-nós singer Alyth McCormack, performed a Lullaby for the Dead, as well as jigs and reels.
Novelist Edna O'Brien and poet Paula Meehan, who holds the title of Ireland Professor of Poetry, also gave readings.
Heaney's widow Marie and his children attended the sold-out event at the 2,500-seat Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall.
Novelist and literary critic Andrew O'Hagan, who often travelled with Heaney around Ireland and elsewhere, described him as "a representative of poets" power to replenish the imagination and affirm the interior life.
"His poems from the very beginning were reports from the heart and, sure enough, they were voicings of a human spirit issuing tolerance and empathy in desperate times," O'Hagan, who served as the anchor for the two-hour poetry reading and musical offering, said.
O'Hagan said that in his poems Heaney, who was the eldest of nine children of a cattle dealer and grew up on a farm in Co Derry, west of Belfast, "was a voice of the pasture and the inner ear, the bramble patch and lost time".
One of Heaney's most famous collections was Death of a Naturalist, the eponymous poem from which, read by Muldoon, vividly describes a mass of frogs sitting in a pond "poised like mud grenades...
"The great slime kings were gathered there for vengeance and I knew that if I dipped my hand the spawn could clutch it".
Playwright Simon Armitage read a passage from Heaney's adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon classic Beowulf, describing the man-beast Grendel slaughtering dozens of men for revenge.
Irish-Ethiopian actress Ruth Negga read from his Burial at Thebes based on Sophocles's fifth century BC tragedy, in which Antigone bemoans Creon's edict barring her from burying her brother.
After an evening that also featured a performance of Heaney's translation of Czech composer Leos Janacek's song cycle Diary of One Who Vanished, sung by English tenor Ian Bostridge with Julius Drake on the piano, O'Hagan said he thought his late friend would have approved.
"At the end he would be embarrassed by it, of course, but secretly pleased," O'Hagan said.
