Follower

Follower by Seamus Heaney remembers the poet as a small boy following his father as he ploughed the fields with a horse. The boy admired him and wanted to be like him. Now, as an adult, the roles have reversed: his ageing father follows him.

Heaney grew up on a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and published the poem in 1966. He chose to become a writer rather than a farmer like his father.

The poem has six quatrains with a regular ABAB rhyme, often half-rhymes, and a steady rhythm, like the steady work of ploughing.

The first five stanzas are about the father's skill. The last stanza turns to the present day: now ‘It is my father who keeps stumbling’ behind the poet. The ending is ambiguous: is the father a burden, or a memory that won't leave?

The first line, ‘My father worked with a horse-plough’, starts simply, like a child's memory.

The father is described as powerful and skilled: ‘His shoulders globed like a full sail strung’, a simile of strength. The one-line sentence ‘An expert.’ sums up the boy's admiration. A semantic field of farming words, for the plough and the parts of the field, shows the skill and knowledge it took.

The boy ‘stumbled in his hob-nailed wake’, struggling to keep up, as a small boat follows a ship.

Themes: family; a child's admiration for a parent; growing up; roles reversing with age.

Compares well with:

• Climbing My Grandfather: a child's admiration of an older relative, as if he were huge.
• Walking Away: a father and son, from the father's side.
• Mother, any distance: a child growing up and away from a parent.