Follower

• 'Follower', written by the poet Seamus Heaney, describes a vivid memory from the speaker’s childhood. The speaker describes his father, an expert, teaching him how to work the land. The poem’s ending suggests the speaker acknowledges the changing relationship and power dynamic as he grows up.
• “My father worked with a horse-plough,

  His shoulders globed like a full sail strung

  Between the shafts and the furrow.

  The horses strained at his clicking tongue.”
• • Heaney begins his first-person poem with a narration describing the speaker’s father as in charge and capable, in order to show the respect he had for him
• “An expert. He would set the wing

  And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.

  The sod rolled over without breaking.”
• “At the headrig, with a single pluck

  Of reins, the sweating team turned round

  And back into the land. His eye

  Narrowed and angled at the ground,

  Mapping the furrow exactly.” \
• “I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,

  Fell sometimes on the polished sod;

  Sometimes he rode me on his back

  Dipping and rising to his plod.”
• • Heaney’s speaker remembers how difficult it was for him as a child working on the farm 
  • The poem shows the close bond between the father and son, linked by shared labour
• • Heaney shows how much respect the animals have for his father, reacting as soon as his father commands
  • The vivid memories present the influence of his father on his life
• “I wanted to grow up and plough,

  To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

  All I ever did was follow

  In his broad shadow round the farm.”
• I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,

  Yapping always. But today”
• “It is my father who keeps stumbling

  Behind me, and will not go away”
• • Heaney uses a list to show the repetition of the son’s actions as a child in order to present the perspective of the father, offering an alternative view
• The childhood memory is presented in the first-person voice of an adult son to show his perspective as he looks back on the past
• The poem is cyclical in nature, repeating ideas about dependence

  As a child he “stumbled in his hob-nob wake” but now his father “keeps stumbling”
• Heaney uses a caesura to show the changing nature of their relationship: “Yapping always. But today”
• Heaney’s poem is made up of four quatrains with lines of similar length in a disciplined an controlled structure 
• The semantic field of work shows the hard labour his father was capable of

  • The verbs “worked”, “strained”, “narrowed” and “angled” present the work his father did as steady and careful
  • The sensory imagery in “sweating team” and “clicking tongue” present the father as in control
• The simile presents his father as strong: “His shoulders globed like a full sail strung”
• • The collection focuses on Heaney’s rural childhood, working on the farm with his father, being taught how to do manual labour
  • The poem focuses on the lessons the son was taught by his father 
  • As the eldest child, he was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps