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.

Context

“Follower” comes from Death of a Naturalist (1966), and like much of that book it grows out of Heaney’s childhood on the family farm in County Derry. The poem looks back at the boy trailing after his father as he ploughed, longing to grow up into the same skill and strength. Then, in its closing turn, it jumps forward to the present, where the roles have quietly swapped.

For Paper 2 this is one of your strongest poems on the father-son relationship and the passage of time. It sits beautifully beside “Digging”: both are about a son measuring himself against a powerful father, and both are about inheritance. If a question asks about Heaney’s family relationships, admiration, or the way the past presses on the present, “Follower” should be in your answer.

Key Moments

The poem opens with the father at work, and Heaney’s admiration is total. The father is an expert, in complete control of the horse-plough.

“My father worked with a horse-plough, / His shoulders globed like a full sail strung.”Follower, ll.1-2

The middle of the poem is full of the boy stumbling along behind, getting in the way, being carried on his father’s back. He dreams of one day being the ploughman himself, but for now he is clumsy and small.

“I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake, / Fell sometimes on the polished sod.”Follower, stanza 4

Then the famous reversal arrives in the final stanza. The boy who once followed is now the grown man, and it is the father, old now, who keeps following him, stumbling and getting in the way. The whole power dynamic of the poem flips in a few lines.

“But today / It is my father who keeps stumbling / Behind me, and will not go away.”Follower, closing lines

Key Themes

The central theme is the relationship between father and son, and how it changes with time. As a child Heaney idolises his father, sees him as an expert and a giant. By the end the strong father has become the dependent one. That reversal is the engine of the poem, and it carries a mix of love, guilt, and sadness.

Inheritance and ambition run through it too. The boy wants to grow up to plough like his father, just as in “Digging” he measures himself against the diggers. There is also the theme of memory and the inescapable hold of the past. That final image of the father who “will not go away” suggests the parent is always there, in the mind, even when the child has long outgrown him.

Literary Devices

Heaney builds the father into something heroic through simile. The opening comparison of his shoulders to “a full sail strung” makes him look like a ship, powerful and graceful. The language of expertise then piles up, the vocabulary of a craftsman in full command of his work.

“An expert. He would set the wing / And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.”Follower, stanza 2

The key structural device is the reversal at the end, where “follower” comes to mean the opposite of what it meant at the start. Watch the verb “stumbling,” which is first used of the child and then handed to the father, so the same word measures the whole change between them. There is gentle rhyme and a steady rhythm throughout that mirror the back-and-forth turning of the plough.

Mood

For most of the poem the mood is one of warm admiration, a child’s wide-eyed pride in a hero. There is energy and movement in the ploughing scenes. The final stanza changes everything: the tone turns wistful, a little guilty, even slightly haunted by that phrase about the father who will not go away. Love is still there, but it is shadowed now by the weight of time and reversal.

Conclusion

“Follower” takes a simple childhood memory and turns it into something quietly profound about time and family. The boy who worshipped his father and longed to follow him ends up being the one followed. For the exam, build your answer around that reversal, link it to the admiration in the opening, and connect it to “Digging” if the question allows. Few poems on the course handle the father-son bond with this much tenderness and honesty.

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