Follower Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney · Leaving Cert Poetry

A poem about hero worship and the way time turns the tables between a son and his father. It pairs naturally with “Digging” on the theme of inheritance.

Follower Seamus Heaney: What Heaney is doing here

“Follower” comes from Death of a Naturalist (1966), the same first collection as “Digging”, and it grows out of the same County Derry farm. The poem watches Heaney’s father ploughing with a horse team, seen from behind by the small boy trailing after him. For five stanzas that boy is clumsy and the father is magnificent. Then the last three lines swing the whole poem round, and the man who was followed becomes the one who follows. Everything before it exists to make that turn land. It pairs with “Digging” on inheritance and the weight of a father’s example.

Reading it line by line

Stanza 1

The poem opens on the father at work, and the first thing Heaney gives us is his body. The shoulders are compared to a sail pulled tight, “a full sail strung”, which turns the man into something wind-driven and powerful, closer to a ship than to a farmer. Notice that the boy is not in this stanza at all. We get the horses, the shafts, the furrow and a click of the tongue the animals obey at once. Control is established before anything else, and it is established without the father saying a word.

Stanza 2

Two words open the stanza and set the poem’s attitude: “An expert.” It is a full stop where you would expect a sentence to keep going, and the abruptness makes it a verdict rather than a compliment. What follows is the vocabulary of the trade, the wing and the steel-pointed blade being fitted, the sod turning over in one piece without breaking. Heaney proves skill through equipment and result instead of through praise. A child who watches this closely has learned the names of things, which is its own kind of inheritance.

Stanza 3

The team is turned at the end of the row with a single pull on the reins, and the ease of it is the point: no effort, no fuss, a heavy animal redirected by a wrist. Then the poem moves to the father’s eye, narrowed and angled at the ground, measuring the line of the furrow as he goes. This is the most concentrated image of expertise in the poem. The father is not simply strong, he is precise, and precision is harder to admire from a distance and much harder to copy.

Stanza 4

Now the boy arrives and the register changes completely. He stumbles along in the tracks of the boots, “I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake”, and falls on ground his father has just turned smooth. That word “wake” keeps the sailing image of the first stanza running, so the father is still the ship and the child is the disturbance behind him. Then comes a moment of tenderness, the boy carried on his father’s back, rising and falling with the older man’s walk. Admiration and helplessness arrive in the same four lines.

Stanza 5

The boy states his ambition plainly. He wants to grow up and plough, to close one eye and stiffen his arm the way his father does, which is a child’s idea of skill as a posture you can copy. Against that wish Heaney sets what actually happened: all he ever did was follow. The admission lands heavily because the stanza has only just told us what he wanted instead. The shadow he follows in is a broad one, and a broad shadow is shelter and something you cannot get out from under at the same time.

Stanza 6

The last stanza begins by piling up the boy’s failures, tripping, falling, chattering, and then it breaks. The turn takes a single word, and after it the tense changes and so does the direction of travel. The father is old now, and it is he who stumbles along behind, and who “will not go away”. The verb the poem used for the child in stanza four is handed to the father, so one word measures the whole distance between then and now. Heaney never explains the feeling, and that restraint is why the ending works.

The themes examiners ask about

• Hero worship, and how it fades. For five stanzas the father is expert, strong and exact while the boy is in the way. The poem is honest that this is a child’s view of a parent, and that the child could not have imagined it ending.
• Time reversing a relationship. The turn does not just tell us the father grew old. It gives the father the child’s clumsiness and gives the son the father’s position, so the roles do not merely change, they swap.
• Inheritance and guilt. The son did not become a ploughman, and the closing line refuses to let the father be set down. Whether that weight is love or burden, the poem does not say.

What the language is doing

• Simile drawn from sailing. Shoulders like a sail, then the boy in his father’s wake. Effect: the father moves like something large and driven, and the child is the turbulence behind him.
• Technical vocabulary. The parts of the plough are named exactly. Effect: skill is demonstrated rather than asserted, and the naming itself feels handed down.
• Sentences running over the stanza breaks. The lines carry on past the gaps the way the plough runs to the end of the row and turns. Effect: the shape of the poem imitates the work it describes.
• One word used twice. Stumbling belongs to the boy, and then to the father. Effect: the reversal is made by vocabulary, not by explanation.

How the poem feels

Warm and admiring for most of its length, and physical with it: there is real pleasure in the horses, the turned sod and the ride on the father’s back. The child’s voice is proud rather than resentful. Then the closing lines cool the whole thing down. Nothing is stated outright, but the mood at the end is uneasy, tender and faintly guilty all at once, and the poem stops before you can settle on which of those it wants.

The mistakes examiners see

• Retelling the ploughing. The description exists to build the father up so the ending can turn him over; describing it without saying why scores nothing.
• Treating the ending as simple sadness. There is love, guilt and irritation in it, and an answer naming only one has flattened the poem.
• Missing the repeated word. The stumbling that passes from son to father is the cleanest piece of evidence on the page.
• Writing about the father and forgetting the speaker. This is a poem about the watcher as much as the watched.
• Saying the poem is about death. The father is old and very much present, not gone.

What to quote and why

Four short quotes will carry a full answer, and each is set out above at the point where it does its work.

• The sail image in stanza one, for how the father is built into something heroic before the boy appears.
• The two-word verdict opening stanza two, for admiration delivered flat.
• The stumbling in stanza four, for the child’s clumsiness and for the sailing image running on.
• The refusal in the closing line, for the reversal the whole poem is built towards.

Check you can do this

• What has the poem established about the father before the boy appears at all?
• Which single word carries the reversal, and where does it appear first?
• How does the sailing imagery connect the father and the son?
• Why does the poem stop where it does instead of explaining the ending?

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