Follower

• Follower


  Poem by Seamus Heaney reflecting on his childhood memories of working on the family farm and admiring his father's skills
• The poem was written in the sixties, just before the Troubles in Northern Ireland
• Heaney cited John Keats, William Yeats, and Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh as influences
• The poem explores the speaker's relationship with his father throughout his childhood and includes an interesting role reversal at the conclusion
• First person perspective


  The poem is written in the first person, making it intimate and personal
• Past tense


  The poem is mostly written in the past tense, grounding the narrative in childhood memories
• The opening lines


  Instantly set up the focus of the poem on the speaker's father and their relationship
• Imagery


  • - Comparing the father's shoulders to a "full sail strung"
  • Describing the "clicking tongue" that makes the horse move
  • These vivid details demonstrate the speaker's close observation of his father's work
• Heaney employs a solid structure in his poem to emphasise the role of hard work on the farm and how this contributes to his admiration towards his father
• Cyclical narrative


  • Some part of the language or theme or narrative is mirrored or regained at the end of the poem from the start
  • Demonstrates the strong paternal bond between the speaker and his father
  • Shows how the roles between children and parents change as they grow up and age
• Stable rhythmic pattern


  • Lines are around eight syllables long
  • Aids the steady rhythm of the poem
  • Reflects the stable relationship between the speaker and his father
• Iambic tetrameter


  • Regular rhythm of four pairs of syllables, with the stress falling on the second syllable
  • Suggests an incomplete aspect to the paternal relationship, hinting at tensions between father and son
• Quatrains


  • Poem is structured into four-line stanzas
  • Ordered in an ABAB rhyming scheme
  • Each stanza contains one perfect rhyme and one slant rhyme
  • Mirrors the feeling that Heaney will never live up to his father's aptitude for farm-work
• Quatrains


  • Neat, stable structure mirrors the well ploughed fields the poem references
  • Could be Heaney commenting on how he is able to achieve a similar level of perfection, just through the manipulation of words rather than physical soil
  • Tight structure may reflect the claustrophobic, tight-knit environment that Heaney was brought up in
• Transposed sentence


  • Changing the order of a sentence, e.g. "Yapping always" instead of "always yapping"
  • Could display traditional dialect or show how all consuming the boy's admiration for his father is
• Passive vs active verbs


  • Unusual phrasing like "rode me" suggests the speaker is remaining a passive character by contrast to his active father
  • As the poem progresses, the active verbs start to be applied to the son more, and become present tense rather than past
• Consonance


  • Heaney employs a lot of consonance, e.g. the 'k' sound in "sock", "pluck" and "clicking"
  • Could be trying to replicate the hard nature of the work his father is completing
  • Provides a sturdy, stable rhythm to the poem
• Rural imagery & technical language


  • Intense focus on rural and natural language, reflecting Heaney's upbringing and the setting
  • Also uses more technical farming language, which may isolate unfamiliar readers
• Onomatopoeia


  • Words that sound like the object they describe, e.g. "pluck", "yapping" and "clicking"
  • Creates a texture of sounds and highlights the speaker's attentiveness to his father's work
• Nautical references


  • Subtle references to sailing, linking it to the precise and skilled work of farming
  • Suggests both professions must deal with unpredictable weather
• Admiration


  Semantic field of admiration, depicting the father as an "expert" who was "mapping the furrow exactly"
• I stumbled into his hob-hailed wake
• Will not go away
• An expert.